alt Hacker NewsWell why haven't all the big tech companies done it then?
They have only themselves to blame. They had years to fix the problem of inappropriate content being delivered to kids and their response was sticking their fingers in their ears and saying "blah blah blah parenting blah blah blah"
And it really should be the opposite. Assume content is not kid-safe by default, and allow sites to declare if they have some other rating.
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Because it isn't in their financial interest. They've either done nothing or actively lobbied for these ID laws. You can plausibly explain it in a number of ways, including regulatory capture, deanonimization, spam reduction, etc.
> sticking their fingers
I actually think it was giant wads of cash.
The tech companies are the ones lobbing for age verification.
The entire point of this scheme is mass surveillance and shifting responsibility away from big tech companies. It has nothing at all to do with "protecting" kids. Preventing kids from accessing adult material is not even remotely a goal, it is a pretext. Just like every other "think of the children" argument.
The reason is that this whole push for age verification is nothing to do with actually stopping kids seeing the content. If it was then this kind of solution would be being legislated for. It’s just about making everyone identifiable.