Discussion

An investigation of the forces behind the age-verification bills

spondyl: This is effectively a duplicate of this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362528I would also encourage taking a critical look at the underlying investigation as it seems mostly LLM generated without a huge amount of manual due dilligence

altairprime: [delayed]

jgord: Did Meta spend around 60Mn lobbying for age verification to be forcibly added to every OS install ?If not, who has been paying to lobby for these age verification laws ?That seems a question that we should have an answer to.Forcing an age check upon linux install seems anti-competitive, and a violation of freedom of speech allowed by the Constitution.Also impractical and ineffective, unless they plan on some sort of bio-metric confirmation of age.Will they outlaw computation itself, or constrain a personal quota so that only corporations can access approved LLMs and certainly not run a local AGI ?As with the insane "encryption is a weapon and cant be exported" policy of the 80s, this will surely force innovation to migrate outside the US.

zahlman: I also submitted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47370954 because it was pointed out to me that a Reddit submission about the same story on r/linux had been taken down. If there was LLM content I suppose that might at least partially explain a moderator decision there... ?

creddit: > As with the insane "encryption is a weapon and cant be exported" policy of the 80s, this will surely force innovation to migrate outside the US.Not advocating for this policy but if a critical argument against it is that policymakers can expect an analogous amount of computer innovation migrating out of the US as it saw in the 80s, then I think policymakers won't care remotely. Quite literally I think the lower bound for the proportion of global computer innovation happening in the US is 70%.

SilverElfin: No, the mods did not make a decision. It got flagged by an auto moderator bot, because of mass flagging. The mass flagging seems to be a brigade that happened on prior posts in that same subreddit discussing this topic of age verification. I don’t have any definite evidence, but it seems odd that a topic that is so relevant to that community would be flagged, so I assume it is a coordinated attack.

SilverElfin: Maybe it’s a dupe but I think it’s an important topic to discuss. And even if it is mostly LLM generated, that doesn’t mean it is completely invalid. Some of the major points around Meta’s lobbying, and Anthropic’s donations, are seemingly valid.

infotainment: > Did Meta spend around 60Mn lobbying for age verification to be forcibly added to every OS install ?Of course they would want this -- as long as the OS reports that the user is over 18 via such a system, then Meta is legally off the hook for any COPPA violations.

creddit: I have no idea if Meta is driving these, but the only way it would make sense for them to do it is if they saw age-verification as inevitable and would prefer to pass on the costs/liability of implementation to the app store providers. If they didn't see them as inevitable, then it makes no sense for them to be pushing for these as they are fundamentally against their own growth.

dang: Url changed from https://lwn.net/Articles/1062779/, which points to this.

intended: I’ve moderated on Reddit before - a mass report bot on r/linux specifically for age verification is too strangely niche. Also automod doesn’t remove flagged posts, unless it has been set up to do it.It’s also very definitely ai generated, and makes several claims and implication. Users may have reported it as well.I would hesitate to assume coordinated behavior at this stage.

intended: I want to appreciate the fact that the investigation exists, and that someone has made it.However this is the kind of investigation that Reddit is famous for, which ends up causing more harm than good, like the Boston bombing investigation.Age verification, for example, is coming no matter what - there’s a big enough chunk of voters tired of tech globally.Governments are also tired of dealing with tech and want to bring them to heel.These macro forces are far more significant than the amounts identified on lobbying in this investigation (~$63 mn iirc)Given the title, the reading of the article implies Meta is driving age verification.The content of the investigation, reads more as meta taking advantage of the push for age verification to move it to the OS layers.

jaesonaras: Just ban lobby groups. Politicians are public servants, not corporate servants.

novok: Man if the EU made GDPR a 45M+ user platform thing most of the issues with it would've gone away.

theptip: > the sponsor of Louisiana's HB-570, publicly confirmed that a Meta lobbyist brought the legislative language directly to her. The bill as drafted required only app stores (Apple, Google) to verify user ages. It did not require social media platforms to do anything.Thing is, when these “make the websites collect your ID” proposals come up, the overwhelming sentiment here is “this is terrible and we need to do it lower in the stack”. I think the OS is a better place than the website. (Let security conscious folks use a standalone device too if desired.)The astroturfing stuff is obviously sus, I don’t have a feel for whether this is egregious by the standards of $T companies or just par.Of course, the EU option of using proper ZK proofs etc sounds way better as portrayed in the OP. But when you actually dig in, doesn’t the EU effectively mandate OS support too, eg https://eudi.dev/1.7.1/architecture-and-reference-framework-..., https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-doc-archi... ? Maybe this isn’t set yet but it seems a likely direction at least.

ChrisArchitect: Which was previously the submitted url on this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362528 (Reddit appears to have briefly removed the post, so then the HN submission was updated). So, dupe & merge?

hedora: After looking at the California bill a bit, I'm equally worried about the implications for application developers as I am for the implications for OS developers.It says apps must use the age signal as proof the user is a minor, and then behave according to all California laws regarding that. (I'm not a lawyer, but that's my read.)So, does this apply to applications that run locally? What if an under 13 year old tries to read a text file with lots of swear words or ascii b00bs? Does emacs need to stop them? cat? xterm?