>You need to pay for a drivers license or a passport and so on.
I have a government ID and I didn't pay for it. I can use it to travel to nearby countries in lieu of a passport. The assumption that IDs are necessarily non-free (to the issuee) is pretty funny to me.
>it's something that is procured in order to access specific services on the internet, which is not free.
The maintenance of the Internet is already paid for through ISP contracts.
I mean, if you really want to make the government subsidize an ID verification scheme or mandate that certain real-world locations provide age verification as a social service for everyone, that's fine.
It's orthogonal to the discussion, though, which is about whether we should do it or not, because the costs here aren't significant and don't change the terms of the debate.
I'm personally in favor of just banning children off the Internet, but I don't agree it's orthogonal to the discussion. What I replied to was the implication that someone should pay a recurring cost to prove they're an adult for the same reason that they pay to own a computer or to connect to the Internet. Don't disown the dumb thing you said.
I'm not disowning it at all. I think paying a recurring cost to prove you're an adult for purposes of accessing the internet is completely fine, trivial, and unimportant.
You have to pay a cost to go out in public, since there are nudity laws. You have to pay a cost to use an airport or a train station. You have to pay a fee to prove that you own a car. And so on.
It just doesn't matter. It's not important. It's consistent with how we organize our society in general, which makes focusing on it in this one particular instance more understandable as an attempt to distract from the substantive merits of these arguments about age verification.
>I think paying a recurring cost to prove you're an adult for purposes of accessing the internet is completely fine, trivial, and unimportant.
Okay, but the person you replied to doesn't, and instead of providing an actual answer to their question, you posed a false equivalence between proving your age and buying a computer.
>You have to pay a cost to go out in public, since there are nudity laws. You have to pay a cost to use an airport or a train station. You have to pay a fee to prove that you own a car. And so on.
You are purposefully muddying the waters by being lax with your use of language. The "cost" you "pay" by wearing appropriate attire in public is fundamentally different from the actual cost you actually pay when you engage in commerce; one is a trade of freedoms and the other is a trade of goods and/or services. If your argument is that the freedom you have to trade in exchange for the freedom to access the Internet, is that of not having to show an ID, that's one thing. If you also have to add a recurring monetary cost then that's another.
If you don't have an answer to the question of why someone should have to pay again to use the Internet beyond "*shrug* just 'cause, dude. Who cares?", then maybe you shouldn't have said anything.
> If you don't have an answer to the question of why someone should have to pay again to use the Internet
Of course I have an answer. To do something about the unlimited firehose of porn, violence, divisive, and addictive content that has been pointed at children for the past generation or so.
There's literally nothing confusing about the "why" in this discussion.
The fact that bad people use the "what about the children" argument regularly for bad reasons doesn't mean that all such arguments are bogus.
In fact, it's an indication of exactly the opposite, it's so regularly used because there is a broad consensus that we need to protect children from harm which is why it's often effective as an arguing tool.
The relevant frame for this discussion is will it actually work, and what are the tradeoffs. A trivially small amount of money for a simple age verification scheme isn't a particularly meaningful tradeoff against a genuine social problem. The bigger, more genuine issues are around privacy and censorship and I do in fact concede those are real.
>To do something about the unlimited firehose of porn, violence, divisive, and addictive content that has been pointed at children for the past generation or so.
See, you've answered a different question. The question you answered is, "why should children be protected from the Internet?" I'll give you for free that children should be protected from the Internet, for the reasons you've said, and now you get to convince me that I, who don't have or plan to have children, should spend my money to protect other people's children from the Internet.
> I, who don't have or plan to have children, should spend my money to protect other people's children from the Internet.
For the same reason your taxes pay for schools even when you don't have kids.
Because we live in a society.
If you struggle to understand why that matters without reference to more direct personal stakes for yourself, just know that without a society, the children will grow up to rape you, kill you, and possibly consume you for your protein content.
>For the same reason your taxes pay for schools even when you don't have kids.
But I have benefited from public education. Me paying for someone else's education in return is fair.
>Because we live in a society.
"Because we live in a society" is a phrase flexible enough that it can be used to justify anything, including outright theft: "we live in a society; us taking your stuff is the price you have been chosen to pay for your continued belonging". Want to try a little harder?
You have convinced me that there are in fact no differences between things, and that protecting children from adult content is indistinguishable from stealing from people, and therefore I was foolish to advocate for it.
No. My question was not why am I forced to pay, my question was why should I pay. Obviously if I have to pay, I will (that's a logical necessity, because if I could avoid it then it was untrue that I had to, to begin with). Why should I pay? That is to say, by what mechanism am I saddled with the moral responsibility that justifies me having to spend my money to protect someone else's children? Given your line of argumentation, I'm going to guess that you don't have an answer to this question; your answer is that I should GFMS and just pay. Prove me wrong.
This is orbiting the issue of personal responsibility and social burdens.
I get the impression that you recognize that there are certain costs that are distributed on members of a society, because it is the least problematic way to address some collective action issue.
You could migrate to the libertarian ideal, if that is what suits you. if this counts as GFMS, I sadly don’t mean in it those terms.
I dont know you well enough to know what specific harms would matter to your wellbeing.
It could range from what the state of the next voting cohort will be.
It could range from having a social environment of better adjusted adults creating art, science or just relationships that will impact you as you age.
It’s more capacity for families, mental resilience and less dead weight loss of kids getting trapped into emotional tar pits.
It’s a signal that as a society we don’t want to see our kids addicted, and that if we impose such costs on ourselves, we will impose heavier costs on the perpetrators. There is a reckoning with social media and addictive design that is to be had; this is a step on that path.
It makes it easier for parents who are struggling, and reduces harm to kids and teens.
It may give us a way to deal with the absolute scourge of non consensual intimate imagery.
I’ve personally had to flag and remove stuff of that nature, and even in a country like america, that kind of content is life ending.
In a religiously conservative country, that can lead to much, much worse.
However this is a smorgasbord of ills that society as a whole is struggling to deal with.
You are a standing member of that society.
I don’t know you well enough to make a case that makes sense.
I will add, You also don’t look to be a passive member of society, so you are doubly screwed.
You get the bonus burden of having to think about how to solve the problem in the best manner possible.
>It could range from [...] as a whole is struggling to deal with.
I thought you said you read the thread. You've fallen into the same mistake CPLX has made. You're answering why children should be protected. I've already granted that premise, there's no need to argue for it. My question was why people who don't have children should bear the burden of that protection instead of their parents.
If a more concrete question would help, why should all adults pay to be able to prove that they're adults (just to be able to retain a freedom they already had, I should add), instead of being given that ability for free by the government, and the government collecting the costs of the program from parents?
So I don’t have kids, and I have worked in trust and safety.
As stated, society is finding a sub optimal solution for a person in a narrow read of my situation.
I (and you) are impacted by the second order effects of the decision to do something or to do nothing.
Our freedoms do not exist in a vacuum, or as platonic ideals. They must be enacted through some actions or rulings.
I have a longer spiel on how social media and news media are currently not functioning as a fair and efficient market for information. For now I will just assert this as true.
The broken state of the market, means that I and you live in a world where it is more likely that the worse political decisions get made, polarization and autocracy are more likely not less, and complex coordination challenges do not get solved.
Building ways to ensure a market which does not devolve into a “might makes right”, or “abuse is good” scenario, is to build guard rails and limiters.
This is the current limiter which is being proposed.
In essence, it’s not like we live in a world where things are perfectly fine, even for us.
Do note - I don’t know you well enough to know what things you value, but it is clear you value some things more than just what is optimal for you. So there is a set of values you have, some of which are going to be injured by these solutions, and others served.
One wrinkle in your argument - If the costs could be taken from parents, that would be great, however one group of bad actors in these situations is adults. So as a class, there is some case that could conceivably be made for adults to bear that cost.
>One wrinkle in your argument - If the costs could be taken from parents, that would be great, however one group of bad actors in these situations is adults. So as a class, there is some case that could conceivably be made for adults to bear that cost.
"Bad actors"? I see three separate subsets of people, different unions of which would yield possible interpretations of "bad actors":
* Adults targeting children with the intent to commit illegal acts. E.g. groomers.
* Adults targeting children with the intent to commit legal but harmful acts. E.g. adults marketing lootboxes to children.
* Adults engaging exclusively with other adults in legal interactions that would be harmful (and possibly illegal) if a child were to be involved. E.g. adults trading pornography and banning minors on sight.
(Let me emphasize that these are mere examples, not necessarily representative of their set.)
I don't think it's in dispute that all three sets currently exist on the Internet. I would not say that the third one is a bad actor, though. Yet it by itself would be argument enough to either remove children from the Internet or to cordon them off to their own exclusive corner. So if the third set was the only one that was non-null we would have a situation where there are no bad actors, yet all adults are still bearing the cost of this system.
Now let's suppose that only the first set is non-null. If there's a bunch of criminals targeting children, that seems like a police matter. Why are law-abiding citizens getting roped in? En masse, at that.
For the second set, legislate until it becomes the first set.
The last paragraph of my longer comment was definitely not what I expected to displace our energies towards. Just a potential wrinkle in the thesis.
The larger point you are asking to be established is how you as a class of members in shared society should have costs added to them which.
I attempted to make the case for you; in general you are already paying costs. The maladies from the current state of social media and the Internet mean that you are impacted already, even if you don’t have kids.
The scale of the “pollution” so to speak, from other parties, is not addressable by independent action.
I have a government ID and I didn't pay for it. I can use it to travel to nearby countries in lieu of a passport. The assumption that IDs are necessarily non-free (to the issuee) is pretty funny to me.
>it's something that is procured in order to access specific services on the internet, which is not free.
The maintenance of the Internet is already paid for through ISP contracts.