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(43,532 posts) Fri Sep 2, 2022, 01:31 PM Sep 2022

California's New Internet Law Is a Fucking Disaster

In the name of protecting children, legislators have introduced a trove of requirements that are anti-privacy and almost impossible to comply with.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/californias-new-internet-law-is-a-fcking-disaster

For decades now, it has been a challenge for parents and others to make sure that children can experience the benefits of the internet without being exposed to its more harmful aspects. However, that concern for children can often be taken to such extreme levels that it does more harm than good.

In the 1990s, an exaggerated news story based on a quickly debunked report about online porn resulted in Democratic Sen. James Exon pushing through the Communications Decency Act. Exon, somewhat famously, printed out numerous pornographic images he found online, and put them into his “little blue book” to show other senators to urge them to vote for his law. Exon’s law was later struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional, saying it would place an “unacceptably heavy burden on protected speech” that “threaten[ed] to torch a large segment of the Internet community.”

Moral crusading about the risks of the internet to kids never goes out of fashion, however. The latest version of this is driven by a British baroness, Beeban Kidron, a Hollywood film director who launched a nonprofit organization to push for laws to, ostensibly, protect children online. When people have pointed out the challenges of regulating the internet, she has pointed to China as a positive example.

Link to tweet

Kidron’s group, the 5Rights Foundation, takes credit for the U.K.’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC)—which is not actually a law, but rather guidance for regulators on how to interpret the U.K.’s Data Protection Act. While 5Rights has submitted hundreds of complaints to U.K. regulators about websites under the AADC, the regulators have not taken action on any of them. That has not stopped 5Rights from taking credit for dozens of changes to various internet services.

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