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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Taggart

Apr 15

@cwebber FWIW, the California legislation was opposed by big tech's lobbying firms. IMO what we have here is a fundamental disconnect between technical people and non-technical people in understanding how to address a perceived issue (the internet is scary for kids). Polling consistently shows broad support for this issue, which is in part why this is a bipartisan bill.

I'm not agreeing with it; I'm just saying the motivations might not be from Big Tech itself.

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Mark Shane Hayden

@mttaggart within big tech the opposition mostly came from Apple and Microsoft who would bear the most burden from adding AVS to their products. Meta and Google would actually stand to benefit because their business models heavily leverage the surveillance economy and they are well positioned to be in control of enforcement in the role of "AVS Service Providers"

Furthermore, regulatory capture is the centrepiece of their business strategy, and the opposition to the California law was most likely not over the concept itself but the fact it was state-level, and capturing a patchwork or state regulations is more work than a single federal-level system.

The main thing big tech wants is to make compliance extremely difficult for smaller and newer competition and to ensure that penalties for mishandling the collection, retention and maintenance of personal data remain solely monetary and small enough that they remain just another "cost of doing business".

But yeah "mandated AVS" is Manufactured Consent
@cwebber

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Taggart

Apr 15

@msh @cwebber Do you have sources for those claims? I have sources for mine. And Apple implemented their compliant API before this legislation passed or came into effect.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/declaredagerange

Here are the members of the lobbying group who led opposition to AB 1043:

https://www.technet.org/our-story/members/

Declared Age Range | Apple Developer Documentation

Create age-appropriate experiences in your app by asking people to share their age range.

Apple Developer Documentation

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Mark Shane Hayden Apr 15

@mttaggart I admit it is all conjecture based on the track record of all the players involved so take that as you will. Certainly there will not be easily available, publicly accessible citations for such actions as they are always proprietary.

Note that in the links you cite Apple both complied in advance and signed onto the lobby opposing the legislation. This certainly doesn't suggest a pricipled stance on either side of the issue. The track record of all of Big Tech suggests this would be the typical strategy if all of them.

@cwebber