> buy a card with a UUID from anywhere that sells alcohol/tobacco that is valid for some period of time
Why should I pay continuously to prove I'm an adult? And those cards will be getting sold to kids faster than you can blink. I bet a lot of parents would buy them for their kids.
>And those cards will be getting sold to kids faster than you can blink.
there's a reason i said 90% and not 100% effective. alcohol and tobacco get resold to kids, too.
What makes you think this will be close to 90%? Unless these cards are expensive I don't see that happening.
>What makes you think this will be close to 90%? Unless these cards are expensive I don't see that happening.
its obviously just an illustrative guess. but if the penalty of possessing the card is similar to underage possession of alcohol/tobacco, and larger penalties if a store/person is found providing a card to someone underage, i see no reason why it wouldnt have a similar success rate as alcohol/tobacco.
Why possess the card when you can just buy the UUID on the dark web
If they have access to the "dark web" they can already do anything that requires age verification there. In the same way you expect that the rule to "not sell UUIDs" wouldn't be respected there, I wouldn't expect other age-verification rules to be respected, no matter the verification method.
Well, it's rather harder to sell bottles of beer on the dark web than short text strings.
That is true, it is harder, although AFAIK people do sell all kinds of illegal things there.
sure? i feel like i need to reemphasize the "not going for 100% effectiveness" thing again.
hopefully some parent steps in if their kid is on the dark web trying to make purchases with their parent's credit card.
Well, yeah, I would just give them my code.
Why buy a UUID when you can just get porn on the dark web
Kids can buy drugs on the dark web too.
> I bet a lot of parents would buy them for their kids.
Good. I should be able to make judgement calls about what my children can or can’t access outside of school.
It’s better if they do it under my supervision than against my back, aided by a predator whose only moat is lending their ID, or their face.
> I bet a lot of parents would buy them for their kids.
That changes the default from "anyone can do anything" to "gotta ask parents". Defaults matter at scale. It adds friction.
Why should you pay for an internet connection, or a computing device with a screen? This isn't a serious counterargument.
Because those things cost money to make and to maintain, whereas there's no intrinsic cost to prove one is an adult.
Yes there is.
You need to pay for a drivers license or a passport and so on. So there is an intrinsic cost to prove who you are where you are from and what your birthday is already.
You have to pay for all sorts of small things to participate in normal society. This isn't a serious criticism.
By definition this is not a life critical thing, it's something that is procured in order to access specific services on the internet, which is not free.
>You need to pay for a drivers license or a passport and so on.
I have a government ID and I didn't pay for it. I can use it to travel to nearby countries in lieu of a passport. The assumption that IDs are necessarily non-free (to the issuee) is pretty funny to me.
>it's something that is procured in order to access specific services on the internet, which is not free.
The maintenance of the Internet is already paid for through ISP contracts.
I mean, if you really want to make the government subsidize an ID verification scheme or mandate that certain real-world locations provide age verification as a social service for everyone, that's fine.
It's orthogonal to the discussion, though, which is about whether we should do it or not, because the costs here aren't significant and don't change the terms of the debate.
I'm personally in favor of just banning children off the Internet, but I don't agree it's orthogonal to the discussion. What I replied to was the implication that someone should pay a recurring cost to prove they're an adult for the same reason that they pay to own a computer or to connect to the Internet. Don't disown the dumb thing you said.
I'm not disowning it at all. I think paying a recurring cost to prove you're an adult for purposes of accessing the internet is completely fine, trivial, and unimportant.
You have to pay a cost to go out in public, since there are nudity laws. You have to pay a cost to use an airport or a train station. You have to pay a fee to prove that you own a car. And so on.
It just doesn't matter. It's not important. It's consistent with how we organize our society in general, which makes focusing on it in this one particular instance more understandable as an attempt to distract from the substantive merits of these arguments about age verification.
>I think paying a recurring cost to prove you're an adult for purposes of accessing the internet is completely fine, trivial, and unimportant.
Okay, but the person you replied to doesn't, and instead of providing an actual answer to their question, you posed a false equivalence between proving your age and buying a computer.
>You have to pay a cost to go out in public, since there are nudity laws. You have to pay a cost to use an airport or a train station. You have to pay a fee to prove that you own a car. And so on.
You are purposefully muddying the waters by being lax with your use of language. The "cost" you "pay" by wearing appropriate attire in public is fundamentally different from the actual cost you actually pay when you engage in commerce; one is a trade of freedoms and the other is a trade of goods and/or services. If your argument is that the freedom you have to trade in exchange for the freedom to access the Internet, is that of not having to show an ID, that's one thing. If you also have to add a recurring monetary cost then that's another.
If you don't have an answer to the question of why someone should have to pay again to use the Internet beyond "*shrug* just 'cause, dude. Who cares?", then maybe you shouldn't have said anything.
> If you don't have an answer to the question of why someone should have to pay again to use the Internet
Of course I have an answer. To do something about the unlimited firehose of porn, violence, divisive, and addictive content that has been pointed at children for the past generation or so.
There's literally nothing confusing about the "why" in this discussion.
The fact that bad people use the "what about the children" argument regularly for bad reasons doesn't mean that all such arguments are bogus.
In fact, it's an indication of exactly the opposite, it's so regularly used because there is a broad consensus that we need to protect children from harm which is why it's often effective as an arguing tool.
The relevant frame for this discussion is will it actually work, and what are the tradeoffs. A trivially small amount of money for a simple age verification scheme isn't a particularly meaningful tradeoff against a genuine social problem. The bigger, more genuine issues are around privacy and censorship and I do in fact concede those are real.
>To do something about the unlimited firehose of porn, violence, divisive, and addictive content that has been pointed at children for the past generation or so.
See, you've answered a different question. The question you answered is, "why should children be protected from the Internet?" I'll give you for free that children should be protected from the Internet, for the reasons you've said, and now you get to convince me that I, who don't have or plan to have children, should spend my money to protect other people's children from the Internet.