this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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No. I am more referring to how we left parents to let their children have free reign of the internet and they got injured. It is exactly because we cannot trust parents to moderate what their children do online that these laws are coming up. Do you think we would still get these laws if there were no children on the internet (maybe still for pron but that is because people are prudes).
I see that you edited your comment to take this part out but I do want to talk about it anyways.
You compared this to having automatic roads that shift risky drivers to their own space and how that would be ridiculous. Which it would be. But comparing a law like this to driving is an awful comparison.
Until recently there were very few laws regulating what a child is allowed to access online. But that is just not the same as driving. States require that you get a license, take a test, follow road rules, get your vehicle inspected, and many more requirements. We have these requirements because we know that we should not let an untrained driver on the road.
I disagree. The reason we cannot trust parents is because we are not making them responsible in the first place.. there's not a system in place to assign them responsibility regarding the child accessing places it should not (if we do really think they should not).
So if by "trust" you mean "blind" trust with no accountability, then well, we can't "trust" NOBODY, not just parents.
The problem is that instead of controlling the bad parent, we are trying to control everyone else to try and child-proof the world.
The reason I removed it is precisely because I expected this kind of misunderstanding. You are assuming that in my comparison getting a license is comparable to a sort of age limit permit, but the way I framed my comparison, the equivalent of "getting a license" would be educating the parents and keeping a "parental license". The parent is the bad driver.
That's what this law does. It provides a system (age attestation) and penalties for violating it.
No, this law is not placing penalties on the parents. It's placing them on the OS distributors.
If you come to my house and get sufficient proof that my child is having an account in a web service it should not, and you go to the police with it, do you think they would punish me with a fine or anything? (and you don't even need any sort of special authentication technology for "age attestation" to start penalizing that, btw)
That law just says "A person that violates this title[...]". Which is vague. But it appears to me that this would include the parent.
It is also something that only athe AG can bring charges for. This won't be something that police are getting out their ticket books for. And if we don't like how the AG is handling it, we can try to recall them.