Australians to face age checks from search engines

> That's hardly a good faith interpretation of the goals behind the Texas law.

It's plausible that it wasn't what some of the supporters intended, but that was the result, and the result wasn't entirely unpredictable. And it plausibly is what some of the supporters intended. When PornHub decided to leave Texas, do you expect they counted it as a cost or had a celebration?

> Notice that the goalposts shifted subtly from moderation of disallowed content to distribution of age restricted content. The latter isn't amendable to size based criteria for obvious reasons.

Would the former be any different? Sites over the threshold are forced to do heavy-handed moderation, causing them to have a significant competitive disadvantage over sites below the threshold, so then the equilibrium shifts to having a larger number of services that each fit below the threshold. Which doesn't even necessarily compromise the network effect if they're federated services so that the network size is the set of all users using that protocol even if none of the operators exceed the threshold.

> Note that I don't think the various ID laws are good ideas. I don't even think they're remotely capable of accomplishing their stated goals. Whereas I do expect that it's possible to moderate a given platform decently well if the operator is made to care.

I'm still not clear on how they're supposed to do that.

The general shape of the problem looks like this:

If you leave them to their own devices, they have the incentive to spend a balanced amount of resources against the problem, because they don't actually want those users but it requires an insurmountable level of resources to fully shake them loose without severely impacting innocent people. So they make some efforts but those efforts aren't fully effective, and then critics point to the failures as if the trade-off doesn't exist.

If you require them to fully stamp out the problem by law, they have to use the draconian methods that severely impact innocent people, because the only remaining alternative is to go out of business. So they do the first one, which is bad.

> That doesn't follow. The absolute of a principle being unobtainable doesn't mean it isn't of use. As I stated, you make a case by case judgment when applying it. That you aren't satisfied by the imperfection doesn't imply a lack of usefulness.

The principle was that if you can't operate without doing harm, you can't operate.

But then nobody can operate, including the government.

If you give up that absolutist principle and concede that there are trade offs in everything, that's the status quo and there's nothing to fix. They already have the incentive to spend a reasonable amount of resources to remove those users, because they don't want them. The unfortunacy is that spending a reasonable amount of resources doesn't fully get rid of them, and spending an unreasonable amount of resources (or making drastic trade offs against false positives) is unreasonable.

> I expect you can get quite a bit of moderation for that price. If a given user is exceeding that then they are likely so problematic that you will want to ban them anyway. Speaking from personal experience, the vast majority of users never act in a way that requires attention in the first place.

It's not about whether some specific user exceeds the threshold. You have a reporting system and some double-digit percentage of users will use it as an "I disagree with this poster's viewpoint" button. Competitors will use it to try to take down the competition's legitimate content. Criminal organizations will create fake accounts or use stolen credentials and use the reporting system to extort people into paying ransom or the fake accounts will mass report the victim's account, and then if even a small percentage of the fake reports make it through the filter, the victim loses their account. Meanwhile there are legitimate reports in there as well.

You would then need enough human moderators to thoroughly investigate every one of those reports, taking into account context and possibly requiring familiarity with the specific account doing the posting to determine whether it was intended as satire or sarcasm. The accuracy has to be well in excess of 99% or you're screwed, because even a 1% false positive rate means the extortion scheme is effective because they file 1000 fake reports and the victim's account gets 10 strikes against it, and a 1% false negative rate means people make 1000 legitimate reports and they take down 990 of them but each of the 10 they got wrong has a story written about it in the newspaper.

Banning the accounts posting the actual illegal content is what they already do, but those people just make new accounts. Banning the accounts of honest people who get a lot of fake reports makes the problem worse, because it makes it easier to do the extortion scheme and then more criminals do it.

> If the law discriminates on size you don't end up with (or at least exacerbate) the oligarchy scenario. In fact it acts to counter network effects by economically incentivizing use of the smaller services.

But that was the original issue -- if you exempt smaller services then smaller services get a competitive advantage, and then you're back to the services people actually using not being required to do aggressive moderation. The only benefit then is that you got the services to become smaller, and if that's the goal then why not just do it directly and pass a law capping entity size?

Yeah, I think the thing usually missing from the child smartphone discussions is that many parents are addicted, sometimes even more than their children. Wouldn't expect a phone-addicted parent to moderate their kids, or if they tried, the kids would notice the hypocrisy.

I'm in Australia too.

I feel a lot of Australians think the government is more mollycoddling than it is, it's hard to think of an actual policy in Australia that is outside of the norm of the Western world.