alt Hacker NewsI'm not a fan of online age verification, but this is completely absurd:
> Every website. Every platform. Every app. Every service. Your children will never know what it was like to think freely online. They will never explore ideas anonymously. They will never question authority without it being logged in their permanent profile. They will never speak freely without fear that every word will be used...
No. Nobody's proposing you need to verify your identity to read articles on the New York Times or Wikipedia or political blogs. And nobody is proposing you need to verify your identity to leave comments on a news article or blog post. And any proposed law around that would run into massive first-amendment constitutional hurdles. It would be struck down easily.
There's always going to be a spectrum of websites that range from open and anonymous (like news and political discussion) to strongly identity-verified (like online banking). I don't like online age verification for particular sites, but at the same time I think it's completely misleading to see it as this slippery slope to a world where anonymous speech no longer exists.
We can have reasoned arguments around how people's usage of sites is tracked and how to prevent that, without making this about free speech and "the hill to die on".
We've spent the past three decades trying to invent ways to deduce identity and build profiles of what would otherwise be anonymous users. When the government steps in and compels people to formally identify themselves by their government names, what would you expect these companies to do? They're not gonna say "no thanks."