alt Hacker News> [World leaders] see cyberspace as a threat to top-down technocratic control and view Internet-enabled populism (aka democracy) as something to be quashed.
This has been true ever since the creation of the internet and web.
It's what the original 90s crypto wars were about: the right of individuals to access strong encryption to preserve the privacy of their communications from the government.
Absent that, pandora's box opens.
Age KYC is just the next fight against encryption and privacy dressed up in "for the children" clothes.
Strong encryption always has (and always will) facilitate criminal and illegal activity. Tough tits.
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies should work within the bounds of individual rights, not adjust them for convenience.
If the price of individual freedom^ is that it's harder to track and prosecute child exploitation, drug distribution, and mass terror attacks, then that's the way it needs to be.
^ "Individual freedom" as distinct from corporate freedom. Fuck non-human legal entities' rights to access encryption, aside from on behalf of their users.
> This has been true ever since the creation of the internet and web.
It's true that some have always seen it this way, but it's become much more salient in the current political context. The average politician 30 years ago was barely aware of what the Internet was - it wasn't a major concern. For a brief period, the prevailing (but not only, as you mention with encryption) attitude was that the information superhighway would make everyone was educated and wise as the managerial class elites. Social media muddled the picture for a while, but the Arab Spring was considered to be an amazing example of this - look, people around the world are going to be Just Like Us!
What really kicked off the current level of enmity politicians have for the Internet was the rise of right-wing populism, especially Trump. This really deeply upset a lot of people, and the only conceivable explanation is that bad actors caused it using the Internet, because good and wise people would only come to the same conclusions as themselves, and democracy is only fit for people who come to those same conclusions. It is certainly not because their policy outcomes caused discontent. Since then they've been throwing everything at the wall to stop free Internet discourse in the belief it will make the bad people go away and restore Public Order.