EU chief calls for a bloc-wide push on an age verification app to protect children online. If enforced, users will have to prove their age to access legally restricted sites.
I think the disagreement comes from treating “we have laws” as automatically meaning “we must enforce them everywhere at any cost.” The method matters. This approach flips the burden of proof by treating everyone as a minor unless they prove otherwise. That is a pretty extreme shift from how things normally work in the real world.
We also shouldn’t pretend this actually solves the problem. Kids got access to adult magazines before, and they will get access now through a parent’s phone, shared devices, or older friends. If that’s the target, this kind of system is mostly symbolic while adding friction and control for everyone else.
And more importantly, it normalizes something much bigger. Once you accept that accessing legal content requires proving attributes through some approved system, it becomes very easy to expand that logic. Today it’s age. Tomorrow it can be anything else.
So I don’t see this as a balanced compromise. It’s a disproportionate response to an enforcement gap, with long-term consequences that go way beyond the original problem.
I don’t think laws should be enforced at any cost, but if we can reasonably enforce laws I think there is a duty to do so.
Then there is also a different question of whether we agree with the laws on the books, but that is a different matter imo. Personally I don’t think we should limit access to pornography as strictly as the laws says we should, and I don’t think the ills of social media are solved with a simple age limit.
But that is a separate discussion from the implementation of a (in my eyes) reasonable approach to age verification
I don’t think it’s entirely a separate issue, because how a law is enforced is part of evaluating whether it makes sense in practice.
If a law can only be enforced by treating everyone as a minor until proven otherwise, that’s a strong signal that the law, or at least its scope, may be flawed.
I think the disagreement comes from treating “we have laws” as automatically meaning “we must enforce them everywhere at any cost.” The method matters. This approach flips the burden of proof by treating everyone as a minor unless they prove otherwise. That is a pretty extreme shift from how things normally work in the real world.
We also shouldn’t pretend this actually solves the problem. Kids got access to adult magazines before, and they will get access now through a parent’s phone, shared devices, or older friends. If that’s the target, this kind of system is mostly symbolic while adding friction and control for everyone else.
And more importantly, it normalizes something much bigger. Once you accept that accessing legal content requires proving attributes through some approved system, it becomes very easy to expand that logic. Today it’s age. Tomorrow it can be anything else.
So I don’t see this as a balanced compromise. It’s a disproportionate response to an enforcement gap, with long-term consequences that go way beyond the original problem.
I don’t think laws should be enforced at any cost, but if we can reasonably enforce laws I think there is a duty to do so.
Then there is also a different question of whether we agree with the laws on the books, but that is a different matter imo. Personally I don’t think we should limit access to pornography as strictly as the laws says we should, and I don’t think the ills of social media are solved with a simple age limit.
But that is a separate discussion from the implementation of a (in my eyes) reasonable approach to age verification
I don’t think it’s entirely a separate issue, because how a law is enforced is part of evaluating whether it makes sense in practice.
If a law can only be enforced by treating everyone as a minor until proven otherwise, that’s a strong signal that the law, or at least its scope, may be flawed.