Glyphwhile I have a level of sympathy for the california/colorado style of age-verification law, and I think many reactions against it are overheated, at the end of the day we still have to oppose stuff like this because society's ideas of what ought to be age-gated are just wrong on the merits. the goal is to ban access to perfectly normal healthy things like queer communities and still allow kids access to fucked-up dangerous adults-only stuff like catholicism and the president of the united states
like I have a young child and nothing would please me more than to put their birthday into the OS and then let them go nuts on the internet doing whatever they want, but my values (no child should be allowed to access a chatbot under any circumstances, roblox should be a crime, but children should be allowed to read wikipedia pages about human anatomy if they want) are just not reflected in our social fabric because all age-related internet stuff is just a series of very frustrating moral panics
Cassandra is only carbon now@glyph I mean, I'm sympathetic to, but I think targeting the OS level is really problematic. I don't want to give government veto power over what runs on my own devices, especially when that veto power is largely at the behest of corporate bad-faith actors.
It feels like targeting services, a la GDPR, while still problematic, offers a lot better opportunities for getting things right?
@xgranade I absolutely want the government to have veto power over what runs on my devices!
This example is too confused with different layers of harm, so let me give a better example:
Imagine a law which established a Glass-Steagall level of separation between OS vendors and app stores. If you have an OS you can define an app store protocol, but you are prohibited from operating the store or the certificate authority yourself.
App stores become regulated marketplaces like stock exchanges.
@xgranade Now you've got all the benefits of sandboxing and malware detection that an app store gives you, without the lockout. A side-loading interface for both app stores and root certs, which appropriately informs users of the risks, is part of that regulatory framework.
Damien de Lemeny@glyph @xgranade this argument broke my brain for a second. I would not have thought of market regulation as having a veto on what runs on the device.... but it makes some sense ? It's a far stretch though, I'd make an explicit distinction between vetoing what can be distributed to run on my device and vetoing what I can run at all, because the second interpretation is the same kind of nasty overreach as what app stores can currently do.
@ddelemeny @xgranade let me put it differently I guess: what you run on your device is not and has never been your decision. it is a negotiation between you and several overwhelmingly powerful corporate interests. even if you are running desktop Linux, a pretty big majority lot of that code is going to be written by IBM and companies like it, and if desktop linux ever gets popular enough to bother anyone, they'd definitely use their ongoing maintenance of that code to gain some revenue
@ddelemeny @xgranade when one has a negotiation between a disconnected bunch of powerless individuals and large corporate interest, that is a recipe for corporate abuse. so the role of the government in this exchange is to become the counterparty in that negotiation, taking the users' interest into consideration