It’s for the kids. Let’s remember that. If bureaucrats and politicians get massive amounts of new power to lord over us, this is just a happy side effect.
Reclaim the Net reports that during recent debate in the U.K.’s House of Commons about a Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, lawmakers rejected proposed amendments that would have required age verification to use virtual private networks (VPNs) and certain other services.
That’s good. People use VPNs to avoid being tracked and identified by such tyrannical governments as those of China or the United Kingdom.
And any ID requirement would increase the chances that governments discover the identity of users no matter what rules VPN providers are supposed to follow to prevent this.
But Brits cannot relax just yet. Amendments that lawmakers did approve would compel Internet service providers to “restrict children’s access to specific online platforms, impose time-of-day limits on when services can be used, and mandate age verification across nearly any platform that enables users to post or share content.”
Time-of-day limits? Aren’t parents the ones who tell their kids when it’s bedtime?
If we do descend into a dark totalitarian night with no freedom, no privacy, a telescreen in every room, we’ll have to look on the bright side: It was for the kids. The kids needed to be protected from algorithms, choice, freedom, the deficiencies of merely parental oversight, and books with pages addictively connected to adjacent pages.
Those kids. Always causing trouble.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Nano Banana
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