Protecting children is one of the four horsemen of the infopocalypse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

Governments are also getting more conservative recently with regards to domestic surveillance & social freedoms. In this regard, it's not anyone new, it's just the usual suspects: the same people who fund conservative media, the prison industrial complex, etc.

This seems like an attempt to leverage something widely regarded as reasonable (stop kids from accessing pornographic content without parental oversight) as the camel's nose through the tent to establish widespread identity tracking on the internet.

The fight for this kind of legislature has been ongoing for many years as part of a broader program that seeks to shape the kinds of information that can be stored, consumed, and propagated on the Internet. Age verification is only one branch of the fight, but an important one to the many who support government control: it is an inroad that allows governments to say they have a stake in who sees what.

I think it's possible that there are secretive efforts to destroy permissionless access to the internet, but my guess is that states are simply copying each other and/or global conditions are similar enough that they naturally come to the same conclusions around the same time.

A somewhat analogous situation is how landlords raise rents in sync with each other, not because they're intentionally colluding to fix prices, but because nowadays it's easy to see average rental prices in neighborhoods, and the natural strategy is to set your rental prices based on that.

It has nothing to do with age gating, and everything to do with tracking. While there may be some funding going on behind the scenes, governments love tracking on its own merits.

Do social movements _always_ have people at the top pulling the strings? Is it _never_ the case that even when you can identify thought leaders, the movement itself is organic and broadly supported?

It would be excellent to know who is pushing this and through what means. There is some unprecedented alignment across borders to restrict access and rights.

> The SESTA-FOSTA law is a combination of two bills: the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act; and the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act. It passed Congress in March, and President Donald Trump signed it into law in April.

> ...

> The biggest companies say they can manage the risks. Match Group—owner of Match.com, Tinder, Ok Cupid and Plenty of Fish—says any potential legal issues give “huge advantages” to those with enough size to comply. “We are able to have a big legal team, a big customer care team,” Chief Executive Mandy Ginsberg said.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-law-targets-sex-trafficking...

Plot twist: It's Ashton Kutcher.

https://www.thecut.com/article/ashton-kutcher-thorn-spotligh...

This strikes me as almost conspiratorial thinking, and it's reflected in the article. At one point they say KOSA is unpopular but.. it isn't? These laws (KOSA, OSA) enjoy broad, bipartisan popularity and politicians are jumping on the bandwagon because they want votes. It really is as simple as that.

There's absolutely no way to counter this, or at least to round off the censorship power-grab this is allowing, if we don't admit to ourselves that people have become suspicious of the tech sector (us) and are reaching to clip our wings - starting with access to their kids.

The Christian right has been pushing for this forever. They finally acquired enough political and cultural purchase to get this measure pushed over the line.