I love how every harm you listed, is a platform design problem, and your fix touches none of it. A kid bypassing VPN age checks can still doomscroll and Roblox all day on a school wifi with no VPN at all. The only thing you've actually accomplished is stripping privacy and security from every adult who isn't a child abuser, to feel like you did something about the ones who are.

I don't believe proving I'm an adult to Meta will deprived me of any further privacy than I've already surrendered. What security do you feel I'll lose?

These "platform design problems" are features for some adults. If they want to pour their life into being radicalised by a neverending, bias-confirming, slop-filled doom scroll, that's their choice, isn't it? Outright prohibition is far more fraught both politically and technically.

Blocking 100% of kids isn't required to prevent harm. The key is finding the optimum balance.

You've already surrendered your privacy to Meta, sure, this has nothing to do with Meta. This is your VPN, the one thing you use because you don't trust your ISP or the wifi you're on, now wanting your real ID before it works. A kid doesn't even need a VPN to doomscroll on school wifi anyway. And "let adults radicalize themselves, their choice" is rich when those adults vote and raise kids and show up swinging at school board meetings. Congrats on the policy that needed my ID and did nothing to the kid two desks over.

You're lost. The whole basis of this discussion is that is that certain services (porn, social media) will have to AV. A kid having open network access doesn't help because they still have that interface to overcome.

Services that enable circumvention is a natural extension. Yes that means going through the same verification process you do with pornhub with your VPN host.

Completely by-the-by, your school networking experience is notably different from mine. Ours are locked down. Kids don't get access on their own devices. They whitelist domains, Google has educational filters, etc, etc. Could somebody red team their way through it? Maybe. Kids aren't.

Pornhub checking my ID is pornhub's problem, not my ISP's, not my VPN's, not every other site I visit through it. A VPN isn't a porn bypass tool that happens to also do other things, it's infrastructure I run my whole connection through, and you want it gated because one of the things people use infrastructure for is something you don't like. That's not a natural extension, that's just deciding the tool itself is guilty by association.

And thanks for confirming kids can absolutely get around your locked down network, you're just betting they won't bother. So the actual plan is "trust kids not to circumvent it" for school wifi but "can't trust adults not to circumvent it" for VPNs. Pick a level of trust and stick with it.

Sure, deep analysis of my usage, connection, browser user agent, browser fingerprinting, etc could reveal who I am and that information can all be correlated if requested by Government agencies although my privacy isn't completely surrendered on an alt/fake name account.

I have a Facebook account primarily for Market Place under a completely fake name. I very rarely comment on things on Facebook, but it feels good knowing that my real name is not being posted. From a glance, Meta cannot confirm this account is owed by Joe Blogs.

Requiring ID (which is what age gating is) for VPNs is absurd. Given that SSH can act as a proxy service, are you going to require all ssh connections out of the country to be age verified?

Facial modeling has been good enough for porn.

I'd be surprised if the law requires much beyond a vague best effort from service providers, but many already block connections from known server hosts and some even VPNs.

An airtight block is not what's required; stopping social media being mainstream for kids is.

Lol, no. Face scans are being bypassed using video games. Meanwhile the data has shown 90%+ porn users are unwilling to do them and switch sites instead (citation: https://pornbiz.com/post/17/the_scam_of_age_verification ). The whole thing has been a complete fiasco in porn.

Maybe they should get the pedos out of the government instead of a foolish attempt at restricting and harming everyone else? It's not ever going to protect or make children safer. It never was.

Who are the 'pedos' in government?

Why doesn't it make children safer?

I'm trying to discuss this in good faith but that wasn't even an argument. A bland accusation wearing a tin foil hat.

The onus is you to show it makes children safer - you’re the one advocating these privacy-harming rules.

If you insist on that approach, then for the sake of argument, you could pretend the discussion is about Australia which already has a similar law.

You could argue the benefit to children in repealing it.

Nope. The burden is on whoever wants to restrict people. If you want a new restriction, the burden is on you. If you want to keep an existing restriction, the burden is still on you.

> But some inconvenience is a price worth considering.

You're trying to frame it as an "inconvenience" and not a blatant attack on the fundamental freedom of expression. I get that social media is bad, but sometimes (often) the cure is worse than the illness.

You want age checking, you want ids .