> Rather than age-gating technologies like VPNs, we believe that regulators should address the root causes of online harm by holding platforms to account Honest question: if you tell Pornhub "now you will be fined heavily if you let 10-year old kids access porn", won't Pornhub implement some kind of age verification? How else would the platform "address the root cause"?
The easiest, and the fairest way in my opinion, is to realize parents can and should be responsible for what their children read. Just like you wouldn't give your kid access to your BDSM porn magazines from the 80s, you shouldn't let him online without supervision. Other than that, there is no "online harm". No root cause of anything that would need to be addressed, no problems whatsoever. It's just information passi…
I don't think we can (and I don't think we should) completely block porn from the Internet. But I could imagine that privacy-preserving age verification on Pornhub could make it slightly less accessible to kids (even it if is by opening a link without knowing what it is). I wouldn't block VPNs though: if someone is able to access Pornhub with a VPN through a country that doesn't mandate age verification, then they will be able to access porn anyway.
And then there is not only porn. To me the value of age verification is really to block kids from accessing social media. And again, no need to block VPNs there: it just has to be less accessible to kids. I don't believe that most kids will get a VPN to access social media. Kids are on social media because kids are on social media, we just need to break the network effect.