VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in

That’s plain idiotic. Have you ever met a kid? Good luck with that.

And even if it were somehow feasible to control internet access points 100% of the time, do you think most parents could figure it out? I have friends with teenage children, I assure you, most of them would be easily outsmarted by their kids with anything tech related, and they’re above average intelligence.

I’m not necessarily saying this is the correct solution anyway, I don’t know what is, I’m just saying we don’t need to make up dystopian conspiracy theories to explain the motivation of the people who want to do it.

I know lots of companies working on anonymous attestation, and have been myself interested in this for decades. I don't get why we would need any form of age verification for porn at all though, since the cost outweighs whatever little benefit exists given that it's so easy to work around. Online age verification is like the NFTs of internet law.

There's never really a time I'm not attempting that, but sure.

I don't think children should have access to porn, because they should have access to decent sex education, and (most?) porn is extremely misrepresentative of reality. According to https://xkcd.com/598/, exposure to porn can affect people's sexual fetishes. I think it is bad for people to develop an interest in violent, dangerous, or asymmetrically-pleasurable sexual activities before they have have had a chance to… uh, however it is people would otherwise figure out what they're into.

It is better for people to learn about BDSM from actual practitioners (including the background context, such as… uh, safe words? and whatever a "scene" is) than from fictional characters. If the average person (or, heck, the average 16-year-old) attempts to act out a rape fantasy, without proper access to information about SSC / RACK / etc, how's that going to go?

This isn't really the sort of thing you can teach in schools. For one, children mature at different rates: some 15-year-olds are too young to even be thinking about that sort of thing, while others are having sex in secret while their parents pretend to be oblivious. (And some of us never start being interested in that sort of thing.) Teaching anything more than the basics (how reproductive biology works, contraceptives, STIs, respecting consent, enforcing consent, the risk profiles of various popular sex acts, "if you skip foreplay, you might need additional lubricant to avoid injury", "don't use condom solvent as a lubricant", "seriously, don't rape people") in compulsory education fails to respect children's autonomy and is wrong. (Schools don't teach those basics properly, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.)

I also do not trust schools to provide decent sex education, because there are even "good schools" that cover up peer-on-peer rape, and place the onus of "getting along" afterwards on the victim. How's an institution that does that supposed to teach a holistic notion of consent? (No environment with such a high child-to-adult ratio where the children aren't allowed to leave is ever going to be safe, but the reputational incentives lead to particularly bad outcomes when these things happen; we don't have strong enough cultural norms requiring that adults act responsibly when what "shouldn't happen" happens.)

For similar reasons, I think any policy based on the assumption that children are innocent little angels we must avoid corrupting, is dead on arrival and bound to fail. Children are young people, with all the autonomy that entails.

There's no particular difference, apart from power dynamics, between exposing a 17-year-old to sexual material they don't want to see, and exposing a 30-year-old to sexual material they don't want to see. Of course, we cannot generally ignore power dynamics, which is why age-based rules are useful; but age is a proxy for things like autonomy, capacity for choice, informedness of choice, and tendency for choice to be respected by others. A 17-year-old at risk of exploitation does not magically become less vulnerable on their 18th birthday. If the rules to protect teenagers from harm don't protect all teenagers, there's probably something fundamentally wrong with them. (Yes, yes, you can move the threshold to 20. Very clever. Way to miss the point.) Furthermore, if the rules don't protect all teenagers, they probably don't even protect all teenagers below the age of 18, because they're not addressing the problem close enough to its source / to the harm.

As should be apparent from my earlier post, I have very little personal experience with pornography. But I have spent a while thinking about this topic, and I'm not sure how this position is parodic. Perhaps you could enlighten me?

Maybe the social ills caused by porn will disappear with proper sex education; in that case, I might be inclined to support the prospect of children who choose to seek it out having the authority to access pornography. But my current understanding of the world suggests that a restriction is more beneficial than access. (It's only, what, four years to wait? During which time children can learn to deal with randiness in ways other than "fire up ye olde web browser" or "shag a friend".)

Computer-mediated ID verification, and the Online Safety Act in general, is obviously bad, and should be opposed. But, being obvious, that goes without saying. (Was that your objection: that I didn't clearly pick a side?)

The solution is to have filtering on the actual client devices. There need to be specialized minor-friendly devices with parental controls at the OS level, and apps need a standardized framework to integrate with those parental controls. Then create regulation that devices used by minors must have such a system, with the standard that every new action (app install, first time visiting a website, new contact, joining a group chat, etc) first needs to be whitelisted by a parent, and that parents can see a timeline of all actions.

With this solution, kids are far safer than under recent UK/EU age verification laws, while adults and their free, open & private internet remain unaffected.

> Why did they do it?

You can't monetise the data you don't store