Mastodawn

Well this is truly bad. US national level OS-level age verification bill. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8250/all-info

The text of it isn't out yet.

EDIT: Well the text is now out and it's as bad as you could imagine. It's not even just that you need to verify your age to access a website... operating systems must verify your age to let you *use a computer at all*

EDIT EDIT: Thanks to @Andres4NY for pointing out that it also holds responsible anyone who has any software shipped on the operating system of a computer, meaning FOSS developers eveywhere

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Christine Lemmer-Webber Apr 15

We don't know who's funding this stuff for sure, there was the vibecoded analysis that came to the conclusion of Meta, but I suspect that could be true but Meta wouldn't be alone.

Who stands to benefit from this? A lot of forces of centralization, and anti-LGBTQ orgs:

- Microsoft, for sure, since they are seeing Windows' dominance threatened?
- Apple, for similar reasons?
- Peter Theil and similar surveillance company owners and operators?
- Anti-queer orgs and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation?
- Cloudflare, who will probably run the age verification paywalls everyone will be forced to deploy?

Who's behind this? Who's getting politicians so excited about it? There's such a swell of bipartisan support seemingly out of nowhere, and my suspicion is a lot of that enthusiasm is coming from check-writing.

So who's behind it?

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Christine Lemmer-Webber Apr 15

If *I* were an investigative journalist, this is a piece I'd be pouring a lot of energy into. I know we have a few investigative journalists on here... maybe someone wants to take it up?

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Luka Rubinjoni Apr 15

@cwebber Yes. Also in the EU "age verification" is being surprisingly fast tracked. I'm amazed someone can pull such a vast coordinated effort in this day and age.

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Nini

@rubinjoni @cwebber I'm not that amazed, a wealthy networked trust of people can pay for legislation and have done so in the past. It's the scale that's impressive and yes, democracy is sold for far cheaper than you'd expect or desire.