alt Hacker NewsI don't think age restriction will impact FOSS in the long term. If there are some regulations that threaten FOSS now, they are going to be adopted in the long term.
Regulations for age restriction are understandable. A lot of modern technology is harming kids (and I don't mean dirty videos, social media seems to be much more harmful).
A sensible regulator would leave some responsibility to the parents, but require restrictions for consumer devices (smartphones, laptops). Maybe even enable age restrictions by default, block replacing the OS or the firmware, and only allow it once the age was confirmed.
I don't see a point of including all kind of OS or software into this regulation. Just the ones that are preinstalled on consumer devices, and commercially distributed to consumers. Once the age of the user was confirmed, the devices should be able to become as open as we know them now.
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> A sensible regulator would leave some responsibility to the parents
(Speaking as a parent of three) why can't we just leave all responsibility to the parents? In our experience in the offline world it seems this applies!
I speak as someone who's taken each of my three children - for two of them, multiple times - to the emergency room to be treated for broken bones incurred in the course of Real Life[tm].
Yes, they play contact sports.
Yes, we use Family Link with pretty restrictive settings.
Despite the series of broken bones, I'm still in favour of kids playing sports and still dubious about the effect of screen time on young minds...
> A lot of modern technology is harming kids (and I don't mean dirty videos, social media seems to be much more harmful).
If that's all we want then that's trivial -- just make certain phones that don't have access to social media, or have whatever limitations enforced. And kids only get those phones. I don't think anybody's addicted to desktop social media.
This gets us the privacy and the protection at once.
I think legislation could quite sensibly require OSes and browsers to have easy to enable well-integrated parental controls (which mostly already exists). Browsers could voluntarily send "I'm a child" flag, if you want to make it every website's problem.
But the current legislation is stupid. Treating toddlers like hackers, and forcing every website to deanonymize users. It is so backwards, that it's hard to believe it's not done on purpose as the first step to ban anonymity and strictly control all online access. In the UK of course they're already talking about having a VPN ban, because the hacker toddlers are learning how to mask their IP addresses.
I think a reasonable way to divide up responsibilities would be identify child-locked devices, not people. It should be trivial for a website to identify a device with a child lock turned on. Then it's up to parents to make sure their kids get a child-locked device. Manufacturers can make it easy to turn on, and society can help by not selling devices to kids without a child lock turned on.
It won't work against a determined teen (too many unlocked devices out there), but it doesn't have to work perfectly to change the culture that most kids have to deal with.
The sensible regulation would be aiming at socially harmful features of tech, not forcing people to provide proof of identity to a third party in order to continue harming themselves with the same exact features.
Imagine if such an approach was taken to, for example, food safety? Instead of closing down a restaurant that has poor hygiene, you'd be instead horce the restaurant to hire a private security contractor to check people's IDs to verify that they are old enough to consent to getting a foodborne illness. That's an absurd approach.
> social media seems to be much more harmful
The stuff I've seen on this doesn't look terribly convincing. It seems to mostly be along the same lines as saying that since some people get bullied or hang out with a bad crowd, socializing in general is harmful.
It is already happening. E.g. soon F-Droid and any unattested open source Android app distribution will be gone, due in Sep 2026.
Same with GitHub and similar, we have CLAs for a while now for licensing. But I see project maintainers are frustrated with AI generated slop PRs and bad actor contributions. The ecosystem will be closing. You will be able to read code, but forget creating PR without some ID verification (because this is for kids or against terrorism).
I strongly disagree. There are no kids in my household, and no one else ever uses my devices, so the idea that I need to prove that I'm not a kid for me to be able to pay bills or file taxes on a stock device is ridiculous.