The solution to all of this “think of the children” stuff is that devices owned/used by children should have to be registered as a child’s device, which would enable certain content blockers.

That's kinda the case right now already, but the problem is that adult-only sites don't work with that currently.

So the right solution would be to mandate that e.g. all sites are required to return a header with an age recommendation or something similar, so that a device set to child-mode then can block all these sites. And if a site doesn't set the header, it will also get blocked on child-mode devices

Wouldn't be too hard to do, and accidental overblocking would only occur on child-mode devices, so there's not much of a loss there.

Legislation could then be focussed on mandating that these headers aren't falsely set (e.g. a porn site setting the header to child-friendly).

Adult privacy will be compromised.

Goal achieved. "Think of the children" is subterfuge.

I don't think this is a good idea...

This is even more invasive - it would mean all the traffic and activity in every device would be traceable to a registration. Whereas now they might have a pretty good lock on individual device ids, they'd then have an actual registry of devices and owners to verify it against

Your solution is worse.

As is, it is the responsibility of the content provider to make sure that they are distributing only to people who are legally allowed to have it.

With age-verification the user has to prove that they are allowed to access the content, then the site can distribute it to them.

Your approach is to distribute the content by default and only deny it to ChildDevices. In order for this to work at all, you have to mandate that children can only use ChildDevices. This is soooo much worse than simply requiring that adults who want to see certain content have to prove that they can legally access it. If adults have reservations about providing ID for pornography, the loss of such content seems to be much less than denying children Internet access. (Although, I'm sure that Lemmings would disagree for obvious reasons).

The arguments that I’ve seen against that is that the problem is the hardware. The child can figure out/find a hack to circumvent the restrictions. A determined 11/12 year old could do it. They’re the ones who still need restriction.

Work VPN doesn't look any different to any other VPN to the people tapping the lines.

I'll just use a VPN to hide my VPN use and then they'll never know.

Good luck, I'm behind 7 proxies.

for non-work purposes

Sounds like a loophole to me!

Indeed. With our current system it was only a matter of time. As soon as the internet became a default thing which everyone needed to access just to function in their daily lives, it would of course be subjected to the exact same exploitative mechanisms that the non-internet part of our lives have suffered from since the dawn of history.

They can force custom proprietary spying software on your devices.

• That would block Linux from their borders, which means goodbye Steam Deck in the UK among other things.