I've yet to see any "protect the kids" legislation that isn't either thinly veiled surveillance overreach or corporate collusion

Advertising to children sees more money returned on money spent in advertising. All these protect the children laws will assist advertising and companies who sell space to advertising the ability to make more money.

That is all that it is. The rest of the debate is just filler and weak justifications.

Privacy-intrusive age verification...for social media and video-sharing platforms.

I stand by my hypothesis that this merely a protect the children justification to de-anonymize the internet.

That way, when someone posts video of the situation on the ground in Gaza, the authorities know who it is, and can intervene.

Here in the states, there's all sorts of things the regime doesn't want to appear on video, from ICE brutality and officer-involved shootings, to the conditions in for-profit detention centers, to the conditions in neighborhoods near data centers.

I don't know what all videos might be uploaded in the EU, but it's not completely rosy and rainbows over there.

When a citizen's initiative presents a serious issue, gets a record number of signatures, and provides some good, easy to implement solutions - the European Comission says it'll do nothing, because it wants to focus on deregulation.

The same Comission is perfectly fine with implementing new, insanely vague and/or complicated laws that benefit literally nobody other than big tech companies, at the expense of everyone else.

And then the same Comission wonders why anti-EU sentiment is growing.

We're slowly but steadily getting to a point where the EU has all the dystopian surveillance and control measures in place as China does, except without any of the benefits that come with them.

They want the internet to be as cable, radio, and books before it. It just took longer because of the complexity of the systems. They can't stand that people for about 20 years had the means to educate themselves and they've been fighting to censor it since at least 2012. The problem is that now the tech bros are on board. Before they still had enough idealist types internally to keep them pushing back.

It was only a matter of time. having been raised in the free and open internet it really breaks my heart.

Child indoctrination has always been a thing. Now we are creating a tools for directed internet content and advertising.

The purpose of a Law is what it does, not what its proponents loudly claim it's meant to do.

No, I will not provide my ID online

who could have thought ?

Coming soon, from the directors of ChatControl. WeDiddleKidsAct.

It was never meant to.
But it will be doing exactly what it was intended to do: surveil the citizens.

We know that “think of the children” is an excuse. What is the real reason? I think it’s the lack of accountability for what happens on the internet and no real way to deal with that. Corporate social media have been flooded with inauthentic content which was only accelerated with LLMs. I don’t think this is a particularly good way to deal with this but if it ends up becoming a reality I hope it applies to commercial services only. One thing I’m certain of, whatever needs to be done, EFF will be against it ;)