I feel like we've always been living on borrowed time, due to the historical accident of the internet being built by academics and public institution employees. If internet protocols had been built by for-profits, HTTP requests would include credit card # as a mandatory header.

It was less commercial then. It was not as much "occupied" by intermediaries who think the internet exists for their commercial gain and anyone who uses it owes them something

I think it is amusing how these commercial third party intermediaries today are trying to frame things like "chat control" and "age restrictions" as attacks on internet users' rights rather than attacks on their intermediation "business model"

Generally, there is no age restriction on subscribing to internet service. However third party intermediaries that have now occupied seemingly every corner of the web, so-called "tech" companies, want everyone to believe that intermediaries _are_ the internet (as opposed to middlemen who seek to surveil as many internet subscribers as they can)

I am glad I grew up before the internet so that I understand and appreciate the only service that matters is _internet service_. People today take internet service for granted perhaps but I can remember when it was a new frontier

With internet service, there were so many possibilities. Today, so-called "tech" companies portray internet service as a given, apparently useless on its own,^1 whilst they advertise themselves as offering "services" (usually for free, a Trojan Horse for commercial surveillance). They utilise bandwidth paid for by the internet subscriber to transfer encrypted surveillance data to themselves

1. For example, when Mozilla claims something like without an online advertising "ecosystem" the internet would be worthless. The greed and self-entitlement behind this framing is both absurd and hilarious

I was on some kind of local BBS in 1995 from my local ISP. I found a guy selling a gamepad of some kind. Agreed to buy it. Talked to him for a decent amount of time. Finally set time to meet at local Kmart near my house.

The look on his face when a 10 year old rode up on a bicycle to buy his gamepad. I don't have a good memory but I still remember that scene ha.

And when I was a kid some of my peers were watching Al Queda execution videos.

I don’t know what the solution is, but I do not think kids should have unrestricted access to the internet, especially if their parents can’t/won’t set limits.

Same, so much so!

My feelings of freedom in that era, as a teen in a small 90s US city, were what fueled me to co-found one of the organizations (Fight for the Future) cited in the article!

(No longer in the trenches, just on the board, deserve zero direct credit for any of this work--it's all them!)

Ha, I remember finding the adult section of the file uploads. It took fourteen year old me thirty minutes to download one jpeg of boobs.

LoRD was fantastic, as were the turn based games that other people would dial in to take part of. It was such a different era, but we made it work by setting time limits and cooperating.

I remember winning a 10-kill LORD game on a local BBS. It took ages of me staying up until midnight to kill all the resurrected players after the daily reset. I had only one real competitor on that server and he gave up after I slew the dragon twice in one week (due to great luck.)

Born just in time to explore GIFs of women in bikinis. Born too early to explore trans porn and be confused about sexuality by age 13.

That's a sweetspot if you ask me.