There is a surprising amount of engineers who don’t understand what’s happening. So they deal with it as if it’s a funny thing… yeah if two police officers come knocking your door with hard data, you will just explain… and yeah, I mean kids, can bypass it… right? Wrong. This is not 1995. They can make very harsh laws and they can make it borderline impossible to bypass should some authority choose to do so.
The danger here is control: total and absolute control of who will be able to see what, at any given time. Once upon a time this was a hard problem, not anymore.
I'm glad they mention privacy preserving and being voluntary. It's possible to make digital ID that allows selectively revealing attributes without identity, and that could solve problems like bots, socketpuppets, etc along with reasonable age-gating. It could be an ideal internet if it's properly applied. The problem is it's difficult to verify all the promises are being kept, and if they're not it instantly becomes a true dystopia. And sites could use it in inappropriate ways resulting in discrimination.
They... didn't? They got a petition response from the EU that was more positive than they had expected, and a response from the commission is not court: the response phrasing literally leaves the door open.
Heck, the parallel movement in the US even had a major legislative victory in California, so... what are we talking about?
They’re still around so I don’t see why having a legal setback is the same thing as going poorly. They are attempting their mission again with new bills in US and EU.
I think the scenario posited here is the worse possible one where we are still chronically online but on a dead internet while being fully and relentless surveilled.
The internet of the future is an IQ test. Are you smart enough to get in, do your work in a focused manner, and get out so that you live your life? Many, many people will fail this test.
When people say things like this, they mean the good parts of the internet, e.g. real people who are able to be honest because a pseudonym allows them to say things they would be punished by evildoers for saying if the evildoers could identify them. Taking that away doesn't get you out of the engagement-optimized ad funnel, it just makes that be the only thing left.
So if i can not circumvent the surveilance- can i pack my wanted unsurveiled stuff into harmless data and send them- basically use the surveiled Internet as a UDP layer - over which my hidden unsurveiled internet goes via TCP?
The internet's (at least as we knew it) days were numbered as soon as the dot com bubble happened. It changed from a thing to share info to a thing to make money. It's irrecoverably corrupted and this blatant overreach for everyone's PII is just a symptom.
You need to first provide a passport image + 5 angled selfies + bank statement + proof of employment to the Peoples Democratic European Union before you can sign.
We can talk, talk, and governments will still move forward. Or we can build an alternative that shows it's possible to get age verification while maintaining privacy.
There is a real way out of it -- the governments can have their cake and eat it too. I published several academic papers to prove it, and I'm open to building and deploying it. Would anyone want to work on this together:
I think it's a missed opportunity to not have called it "Stop spying on every EU citizen online". It would make for great headlines and might finally wake people up when they see that the EU has rejected a proposal called that.
"Stop killing the internet" unfortunately means nothing at all to the layman, they will still be using it pretty much exactly as they were before, and governments will just claim "See, internet is still working".
You may be overthinking this. It is privacy that means little to the regular joe. The internet they use every day and it being changed beyond recognition is much more tangible than privacy being curtailed just a little bit more.
And these authoritarian politicians will destroy the internet with these actions. Maybe they will even change society as we know it, and not for the better.
The problem is thinking such initiatives will achieve anything in a bureaucratic system devoid of honest debate and actual democracy.
These citizen's initiatives must at least be tried but simultaneously we must create a new internet forever out of politician reach.
I think it's time that "please let 1800 analytics firms monitor your every browsing habit in exchange for this content" was seen in the same light as "please let 1800 private foreign espionage and propaganda agencies spy on you".
Great point. Reminds me of Biden’s constant whisper-scream “the future of democracy is at stake!”
Like, yeah, it was an accurate statement, but total shit if your goal is to get people up off the couch and into voting booth. Way too abstract and high-minded
I'm reasonably confident that in the relatively near future, the Internet will be so overrun with bots and other worthless "content" that people will flock to platforms that confirm IRL identity.
You don’t need IRL identity, you just need persistent reputation. That reputation can be attached to a pseudonymous identity or an IRL one. But the design of most modern social media is to detach the “content” from the context of the author. The feeds you subscribe to are funnels that channel atomized bits of content to you. Some of it may be authored by them, but it’s the platform that intermediates your relationship to that content more than the creator. The creator is subordinated to it.
A different design logic, and the logic of the blogosphere that preceded it, much more tightly prioritized following a blogger or poster and interpreting everything you see in light of who was posting it. The trust is placed in the account you follow.
We've moved "identity" to a few large monopolists. Who lack all incentive to properly "enforce" it. And whose interest are perpendicular to people owning their identities (being able to take them elsewhere).
"Persistent" reputation won't change that. Because on the internet nothing is persistent, without a central party enforcing it to be so. And as said above, the ones in charge of it now, don't want to enforce it really. You don't own your domain, you don't own your IP, you don't own your feeds, "content" etc. The infrastructure that routes people to your correct "reputation", isn't yours, it's controlled and owned by Big Tech, governments, and some smaller companies. Your feed can be taken offline or away from you in a whim. Access to your blog isn't yours. Not even if you host it on a rasberry-pi in your cupboard.
Aside from maybe some blockchain shenanigans, that is. Bitcoin and maybe Ethereum are the only decentralized "pseudonymous" identity providers that could step into this, but both are ridiculously costly and complex. And wholly unsuited to route content. Systems designed for this, like Tor, aren't really up to the task either. Just look at how insanely hard it is for "Content" that governments oppose, to remain online (e.g. on the tor network). Possible, but so complex, so fragile, that it's not a practical system to use en masse. Yet it's the only working system that comes closest to really owning content in the broad sense.
So it makes perfect sense to turn to the systems that have done this "persistent reputation", aka "identity" for centuries now: Governments.
Compared to Big Tech, they're more decentralized - there are far more governments worldwide "doing identities" than there are FAANG corporations. Hell, even within the US or within my country alone, there are more.
Compared with all other systems, we can control them, push them into a direction we want them to go - democracy. Far from perfect. Bad even. But the least worst way to have some "persistent identity" we can get. Unfortunately.
You’re trying to engineer a social interaction. Stop that!
People remembering your handle is persistent, and people remembering if they had good or annoying interactions with you is persistent reputation that exists in the minds and interactions between different people. These are things people naturally do. If people don’t recognize your name and see it come in a trusted spot they just don’t trust you.
How tech breaks this is deprioritizes the people in the interactions. Instead of sending messages you use a “like” button to be intelligible to the platform. You don’t see the people putting stuff on your feed, it gets fed to a timeline that cuts it off from all context and atomizes it for your consumption. It’s the UI/UX that drives this. Even compare Reddit and HN with old forums. On forums like 25% of every post is just static bits of self-expression. There’s a PFP, the username is bigger, there’s often a big signature block. All of this makes the peoples’ posts feel like a person talking to you rather than text blocks that happen to have a tiny username and timestamp on it.
My point is that you don't own your handle. Therefore you aren't your handle.
Edit: to clarify: You aren't your handle, because it can be taken away from you, can be injected, blocked, overridden, etc.
My technical rambling then went on about how or when we can make this "handle" decentralized so it cannot be taken away from you. Hard. As proven in practice. Almost impossible.
My name is maintained by a government. It is a "handle" that could be taken away too, but is governed in lots of rules, systems and regulations. My face (an extension of my DNA, I guess) is decentralized and owned by me: its the only handle that afaik no one can take from me.
So in social interactions, you're right: reputation, bound to "me", my face, my DNA is all that matters. But online we don't have this. The closest we can probably get is "my name", controlled by governments.
I think you make a good point and it is well taken. You could be right.
But I still believe that people will care about connecting with an actual person in meatspace. I just can't picture any other result except for complete and total burnout with the fakeness of the web.
I haven't considered this before with SKG, but if this progresses, it means the EU parliament may choose to take action based on an initiative that potentially only a vocal minority supports [0], while coming across as if they were simply following the will of the people.
Not sure how I feel about that, sounds kind of problematic in retrospect. Especially since there's no mechanism for triggering EU-wide referendums to help this AFAIK.
[0] population of the EU: 452 million, unique signatures required for this: 1 million
A few things you can legally do online without ID or age verification in the US
1) buy cigars and pipe tobacco (but not cigarettes!)
2) Buy "CBD" by the pound
3) Buy ammunition, a barrel and the rest of gun parts for a glock, except a frame/receiver that can be 3d printed in a few hours to complete it.
4) Order and have delivered wine
But there are people arguing to skip all that and go to straight to ID for social media. It isn't about the children. It's about keeping tabs on who says what.
#1 isn't entirely true. It's a soft-gate but you are legally required to verify age on your site before completing the purchase (I run a boutique cigar brand [1]).
Of course not. But literally any excuse that comes to hand will be deployed if it helps the tech industry continue to avoid meaningful consequences. The same handful of companies that have engineered a global surveillance suite that rivals the most tyrannical sovereign governments wildest dreams (and can trivially detect the approximate age of a user) will without a shred of irony deploy legions of paid influencers and other astroturf to decry age verification as an assault on privacy.
But it is an assault on privacy. If "protecting kids" was the goal here they'd push for regulation that forces websites to return standardized metadata that then gets interpreted by the user agent which can be configured by the parent.
Nah, that's a perfectly fine technical solution. Powers that be don't think like that. They understand pulling someone over to check their license, so something like that will do.
Even for a "Citizens' Initiative", this stuff is remarkably tone-deaf. "No Digital ID" ignores the very-real need for people to prove their identity to government(-ish) entities online, and to do so in a reliable, cheap and convenient way. Sure, you do not want that ID to become mandatory for publishing or existing on the Internet in general, but that's a separate discussion: demand sufficient protection for anonymous/pseudonymous posts instead, which is absolutely something that needs to be codified as part of basic human rights.
"No age verification" is even deader-on-arrival. Parents are literally screaming at politicians to protect "the children" (as always), but pretty much everything that has been tried so far to silence those screams has failed (remember PICS, the Platform for Internet Content Selection: that was the last serious contender, and it has been dead for, like, 20 years). Again: demand a way to implement this securely and anonymously, don't take an untenable abolitionist stance or resort to hand-waving in the vague general direction of "parental responsibility": that has been tried, and it's not working anymore.
And, please, stop vilifying the EU in these matters. The UK left the EU, ostensibly so they could make "more sensible laws" in, specifically, respects like these, and they're now leading the assault on basic freedoms with even more fervor. And no, that's not just big-bad-Starmer's fault: it's a preview of what you have to argue against and propose a compromise for instead.
not all parents are screaming this. Only the parents who refuse to parent their children, and conveniently scapegoat society for their parental failings
We cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society.
You could make same exact argument regarding kids health, alcohol abuse, nicotine abuse, all types of addictions, age of consent, and so on.
You can't just have all the safeguards dropped because you think you're doing a good job. Or, even worse, you have no kids and it's your virtues merely projecting.
> We cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society.
From both someone involved in raising kids as well as someone who knows a lot of teachers: none of the involved parties want that. Schools are at best for teaching, but never for raising.
I respectfully disagree. Yes, parents should raise their children as in be present in their lives and help them grow and shape themselves. However, schools with the rules, social engagements, and learning is also a form of raising. Teachers, especially in elementary school, are extremely influential for young kids. How teachers behave when somebody is bullied, how they handle questions, basically how they handle anything, forms the minds of young children.
Is it the sole responsibility of a school to ensure well raised (for whichever specific definition of “well”) children? No. However, they are a large factor in the raising of children.
School was an escape from my home life, but it could never fix my home life. As a child who had no ability to determine what constituted "normal" in order to escape my situation, the only real solution for my home life was for me to be born to different parents. I doubt any amount of legislation would have accomplished that.
I feel like you must have a very restrictive definition of what constitutes “raising” kids if we’re omitting the place where they spend the majority of their waking hours and the people most of their social universe is based in.
We’ve had a live experiment with this during COVID and it’s pretty clear that kids raised solely at home by their parents fared way worse. Not just on academic metrics, but basic conflict resolution or social skills.
Raising almost all children in these government socialist barracks is so dystopian. What you call "worse" conflict resolution and social skills I call superior confidence and autonomy. People today are oversocialized.
Don't let kids have an internet-connected phone, the same way they can't have a bottle of wine.
If they really need such device make sure that device is locked to a small list of app/contacts possible.
There's no need to lock down the rest of the internet because the responsible person of such kid can't tolerate their complaints. It is a parenting issue.
I have seen religious parents been vocally opposed to their children seeing or even discussing anything related to sexuality.
An example from the past:
"The National Legion of Decency, also known as the Catholic Legion of Decency, was an American Catholic group founded in 1934 by the Archbishop of Cincinnati, John T. McNicholas, as an organization dedicated to identifying objectionable content in motion pictures on behalf of Catholic audiences."
You have to appreciate the level of audacity required for a catholic organization to claim they are protecting children from harms regarding sexuality.
You totally ignored the point OP was making! Even if it is a parenting issue, simply declaring that will not make parents parent better. It's the same reason why we ban children from drinking wine, because parents cannot be relied upon here.
Unless your point was that we should legally ban kids from handling phones, which I think is too extreme.
Just put your kids in a bubble so not a single adult is the slightest bit inconvenienced by having to exercise any social responsibility for their well being. Easy.
> We cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society.
"It takes a village to raise a child." Except these same parents who won't take care of their kids are also the very first who go all "How dare you speak to my child like that! I'm going to have you fired!"
If your way of talking to kids gets you fired, it was atrocious in the first place. "It takes a village to raise a child." is not about carte blanche to abuse any kid that you encounter.
The saying is about kids watching and learning from their environment - from how adults act. If you set up to be jerk or take advantage of random kids that happen to be around, you are teaching them to take advantage of people. And no amount of yelling "their parents are responsible because they did not stopped me" is going to change that.
Parents should be imprisoned if they give children access to the internet. We have to make parents criminally liable. Without a change in incentives, we cannot expect behavior to change. Until then 'parents need to parent' is a slogan and not a solution.
They don’t seem to oppose any of that if you read the intro
> We call on the European Commission to propose legislation ensuring that digital identity and age-assurance systems used to access online services in the Union remain voluntary, privacy-preserving and non-discriminatory. Citizens must not be forced to identify themselves to access lawful online content or services unless strictly necessary, proportionate and provided by law. The legislation should require anonymous or pseudonymous proof-of-age, data minimisation, selective disclosure, open-source implementation, independent security audits, prohibition of cross-service tracking by relying parties, and equivalent alternatives for citizens who do not use a digital wallet.
It has been quite a slippery slope. Services that used to allow password auth have retired them in favour of bank detail login. I can kind of get it, since it's offloading support to the banks, but it's also annoying since the bank logins themselves are a pain to setup, maintain and use (mobile app only).
It would be nice to have some good standard that is less invasive.
At least in Sweden it is because it is a pain to have both bank id and passwords because by contract it is forbidden to allow a user that previous used bankid to ever use password again.
And don’t pay attention to downvotes, that’s part of the game, it’s nothing against you, just accept that sometimes you lose karma :) in some way it’s a good exercise for the ego
The intro indeed doesn't sound too bad, but if you read into the underlying demands, the title is actually quite representative of what's going on here.
Specifically, the requirement to provide non-digital alternatives as well as control over relying parties (i.e. consumers of the 'digital ID' and/or 'age verification' APIs) makes all of this a non-starter.
I mean: non-digital alternatives to digital IDs? I guess that means that nobody should be forced to get a digital ID for access to essential government(-ish) services (like banking), and that's a valid point, but in the context of "stop killing the Internet" just obfuscates things.
And control over RPs beyond GDPR is just pushing it, again, quite on purpose.
There are also fascists screaming at the government to do other wildly illegal stuff. The lousy parents begging the government to "tread on me" would get wildly better results by spending less time trying to create an authoritarian state and more time with their kids they claim to care so much about.
They're children. They have the internet access you give them. This isn't some unsolveable problem that needs government intervention, my parents were setting up filters so long ago that they're grandparents now.
I suggest that you don't make the filters to hard to bypass (I would do DNS in both a DNS server and /etc/hosts, along with a browser extension), to encourage them to learn about technology. (although that might stop working due to Ai chatbots)
And the solution already exists, one that doesn't empower the government to do some truly heinous shit.
Every power you grant the government is another knife they'll eventually stab you in the back with. Maybe you like your current government, but what about the next one, and the one after that?
Instead, just use the tools you already have access to. I was not opposed when California mandated that applications add parental controls, that's fine. If parents want to restrict their children's internet access, there's a continium there ranging from "prudent parenting" to "child abuse", but that can be worked out on a case-by-case basis. I am, however, rabidly against the state requiring you to dox yourself every time you log into a website, because inconceivably lazy parents can't figure out how to use the parental tools that they already have.
Parenting controls are shit on the end device side. It's not working, it's not even trying to. Nobody would need this blanket approach if parenting controls actually worked.
Back when smoking was more normal we basically did leave it up to Big Tobacco to determine how best to tackle underage smoking and they would literally say insane things like “Oh course we’re not targeting elementary school kids! We’re not monsters! Our advertising doesn’t hit them until they’re in 8th grade at least!”
Expecting platform monopolists and dopamine dealers to design for this is folly. They are wired to try to normalize an unhealthy level of dependence on them. Their business model is addiction.
>Ah, OK, so you admit a problem exists. That's step one...
Okay but for your position to be tenable you have to then go to step 2, which is some parents are incompetent at doing this, and step 3, which is that, nevertheless, their children, who are randomized copies of them genetically, still somehow need and benefit from the filters that their parents can't or won't apply. Then you get to step 4, which is that all of the competent people must suffer so those children can get it from a heavy handed government solution. I don't see how you jointly accept all these steps; it means you want to have a tyranny of the incompetent over the competent. You must jointly assert that they are dumb while placing them up and over the not dumb. That's full on crab-bucket, dysgenics by force ideology.
As far as I know the only thing that influences change is money. What methods could be implemented to take money away from governments that implement with such things? All of my ideas would be very low traction but there are clever people here on HN that I am sure could come up with a few better ideas.
One of my (probably dumb) ideas is:
- Create a legal presence in a country that does not require being dystopian, relaxed business laws, less regulation, lower taxes, move most of the corporate side of the business there. Take the tax revenue with you. It does not have to be all at once. Make the move a slow boil so they don't see it until it's too late.
Which countries, provinces, regions, states have the least regulation, least dystopian behavior and the least taxes? There has to be a incentive for business leaders and board members to move things around. Bonus if the saved money pays for a Gulfstream G650 ER or two.
> What methods could be implemented to take money away from governments that implement with such things?
Right now the most important thing to inhibiting a dystopia is to break the lock Apple and Google have on approval of mobile code, because it gets used as a fulcrum by authoritarians. Want to ban VPNs? Make the app stores do it. Censor social media? Have them ban every social media app that doesn't censor. Want to track everyone everywhere? Make the phone provide sites and apps with a persistent cross-service tracking ID.
Whereas if ordinary people had devices that worked like PCs traditionally have, banning a VPN from the Microsoft store doesn't prevent you from installing one directly from the developer etc.
And getting this to be possible could be done by any sufficiently large market. If a sufficiently large market e.g. bans attestation and enforces antitrust, it allows an open platform to develop in that country by starting with compatibility with the apps of existing platforms, and then that platform can expand into other markets. Or you can get an iPhone there that you can install a VPN on and Apple can't prevent it, and then those iPhones can be exported into authoritarian countries.
And if you want a financial incentive for this, how about every country outside the US not wanting their local businesses paying the 30% tax to a foreign monopolist?
> As far as I know the only thing that influences change is money.
You are incorrect. The NIMBY movement has been extraordinarily successful despite severe opposition from moneyed interests. Bloomberg lost embarrassingly despite setting records for campaign spending. There are countless similar examples.
The NIMBY movement is moneyed interests. The owners of existing real estate zoned for high density don't want more of it because increased supply lowers prices. The people in an affluent suburb don't want affordable condos anywhere in their school district. This comes at the expense of the poor who then pay higher rents.
I would rather not incite violence on this platform. That just gets a bunch of people put in a cage limiting their career options and potentially "justifies" even greater dystopian actions.
There is a surprising amount of engineers who don’t understand what’s happening. So they deal with it as if it’s a funny thing… yeah if two police officers come knocking your door with hard data, you will just explain… and yeah, I mean kids, can bypass it… right? Wrong. This is not 1995. They can make very harsh laws and they can make it borderline impossible to bypass should some authority choose to do so.
The danger here is control: total and absolute control of who will be able to see what, at any given time. Once upon a time this was a hard problem, not anymore.
what's the current solution that's impossible for kids to bypass with a borrowed or stolen id, say?
I don't see any proposals yet that will actually work for what they say they'll do.
Things are far more enjoyable as a teen when it s forbidden, remember the golden age of p2p!
Teens who want to see porn will be able to see porns, but they will learn somethings along the way to do so
This is caricatural of course, but it s just so dumb as law as enforcing age verification "anonymously" is just like a don quichotte battle at AI era
I often joke that every technical measure that prevents teens from watching porn is a way to make teens more tech-savvy.
Kids these days have it too easy, we need stronger protections or the next generation will make pathetic hackers.
> the next generation will make pathetic hackers.
"Hey ChatGPT Hacker Core Rizz Edition, can you hack this website for me?"
I'm glad they mention privacy preserving and being voluntary. It's possible to make digital ID that allows selectively revealing attributes without identity, and that could solve problems like bots, socketpuppets, etc along with reasonable age-gating. It could be an ideal internet if it's properly applied. The problem is it's difficult to verify all the promises are being kept, and if they're not it instantly becomes a true dystopia. And sites could use it in inappropriate ways resulting in discrimination.
Hopefully this fares better than Stop Killing Games.
SKG has fared pretty well, what do you mean?
They just had a pretty major setback in court.
They... didn't? They got a petition response from the EU that was more positive than they had expected, and a response from the commission is not court: the response phrasing literally leaves the door open.
Heck, the parallel movement in the US even had a major legislative victory in California, so... what are we talking about?
They’re still around so I don’t see why having a legal setback is the same thing as going poorly. They are attempting their mission again with new bills in US and EU.
am i alone in wanting the internet to be killed? we’d all be better off if everyone wasn’t terminally online
I think the scenario posited here is the worse possible one where we are still chronically online but on a dead internet while being fully and relentless surveilled.
The internet of the future is an IQ test. Are you smart enough to get in, do your work in a focused manner, and get out so that you live your life? Many, many people will fail this test.
I'd rather have the internet healed
When people say things like this, they mean the good parts of the internet, e.g. real people who are able to be honest because a pseudonym allows them to say things they would be punished by evildoers for saying if the evildoers could identify them. Taking that away doesn't get you out of the engagement-optimized ad funnel, it just makes that be the only thing left.
Having a digital ID does not obviate that (in principle), thanks to zero-knowledge schemes.
To my understanding then, the issue is that the EU's implementation only has a ZK-based solution in the plans so far.
But then this initiative says "No Digital ID", not "No Auto-Deanonymizable Digital ID", so...
So if i can not circumvent the surveilance- can i pack my wanted unsurveiled stuff into harmless data and send them- basically use the surveiled Internet as a UDP layer - over which my hidden unsurveiled internet goes via TCP?
You mean a VPN?
The name could also be:
"Stop overcontrolling and overregulating every aspect of our lives!"
The internet's (at least as we knew it) days were numbered as soon as the dot com bubble happened. It changed from a thing to share info to a thing to make money. It's irrecoverably corrupted and this blatant overreach for everyone's PII is just a symptom.
So if i understand correctly, there's no webpage to sign this initiative yet?
You need to first provide a passport image + 5 angled selfies + bank statement + proof of employment to the Peoples Democratic European Union before you can sign.
How are we on the tech and protocols side of having a truly distributed worldwide mesh-net?
i.e. drone swarms replacing ISPs?
We can talk, talk, and governments will still move forward. Or we can build an alternative that shows it's possible to get age verification while maintaining privacy.
There is a real way out of it -- the governments can have their cake and eat it too. I published several academic papers to prove it, and I'm open to building and deploying it. Would anyone want to work on this together:
https://magarshak.com/papers.html
I think it's a missed opportunity to not have called it "Stop spying on every EU citizen online". It would make for great headlines and might finally wake people up when they see that the EU has rejected a proposal called that.
"Stop killing the internet" unfortunately means nothing at all to the layman, they will still be using it pretty much exactly as they were before, and governments will just claim "See, internet is still working".
You may be overthinking this. It is privacy that means little to the regular joe. The internet they use every day and it being changed beyond recognition is much more tangible than privacy being curtailed just a little bit more.
And these authoritarian politicians will destroy the internet with these actions. Maybe they will even change society as we know it, and not for the better.
The problem is thinking such initiatives will achieve anything in a bureaucratic system devoid of honest debate and actual democracy.
These citizen's initiatives must at least be tried but simultaneously we must create a new internet forever out of politician reach.
Agreed.
I think it's time that "please let 1800 analytics firms monitor your every browsing habit in exchange for this content" was seen in the same light as "please let 1800 private foreign espionage and propaganda agencies spy on you".
Great point. Reminds me of Biden’s constant whisper-scream “the future of democracy is at stake!”
Like, yeah, it was an accurate statement, but total shit if your goal is to get people up off the couch and into voting booth. Way too abstract and high-minded
And keep pushing this until it passes. Keep repeating like they do chat control.
"Stop enabling pedophiles in government"
Stop letting regular people know they are engaging with bots
Only massive data gatherers should be able to track and know everything about people
I think if it we want to stop killing the internet, the lack of regulation of AI/bot companies is the biggest problem right now.
The Internet is already dead.
I'm reasonably confident that in the relatively near future, the Internet will be so overrun with bots and other worthless "content" that people will flock to platforms that confirm IRL identity.
Yeah I've been wanting ID for years. Because i neighbor Russia and their propaganda game is top notch. One person one account.
You don’t need IRL identity, you just need persistent reputation. That reputation can be attached to a pseudonymous identity or an IRL one. But the design of most modern social media is to detach the “content” from the context of the author. The feeds you subscribe to are funnels that channel atomized bits of content to you. Some of it may be authored by them, but it’s the platform that intermediates your relationship to that content more than the creator. The creator is subordinated to it.
A different design logic, and the logic of the blogosphere that preceded it, much more tightly prioritized following a blogger or poster and interpreting everything you see in light of who was posting it. The trust is placed in the account you follow.
We've moved "identity" to a few large monopolists. Who lack all incentive to properly "enforce" it. And whose interest are perpendicular to people owning their identities (being able to take them elsewhere).
"Persistent" reputation won't change that. Because on the internet nothing is persistent, without a central party enforcing it to be so. And as said above, the ones in charge of it now, don't want to enforce it really. You don't own your domain, you don't own your IP, you don't own your feeds, "content" etc. The infrastructure that routes people to your correct "reputation", isn't yours, it's controlled and owned by Big Tech, governments, and some smaller companies. Your feed can be taken offline or away from you in a whim. Access to your blog isn't yours. Not even if you host it on a rasberry-pi in your cupboard.
Aside from maybe some blockchain shenanigans, that is. Bitcoin and maybe Ethereum are the only decentralized "pseudonymous" identity providers that could step into this, but both are ridiculously costly and complex. And wholly unsuited to route content. Systems designed for this, like Tor, aren't really up to the task either. Just look at how insanely hard it is for "Content" that governments oppose, to remain online (e.g. on the tor network). Possible, but so complex, so fragile, that it's not a practical system to use en masse. Yet it's the only working system that comes closest to really owning content in the broad sense.
So it makes perfect sense to turn to the systems that have done this "persistent reputation", aka "identity" for centuries now: Governments. Compared to Big Tech, they're more decentralized - there are far more governments worldwide "doing identities" than there are FAANG corporations. Hell, even within the US or within my country alone, there are more. Compared with all other systems, we can control them, push them into a direction we want them to go - democracy. Far from perfect. Bad even. But the least worst way to have some "persistent identity" we can get. Unfortunately.
You’re trying to engineer a social interaction. Stop that!
People remembering your handle is persistent, and people remembering if they had good or annoying interactions with you is persistent reputation that exists in the minds and interactions between different people. These are things people naturally do. If people don’t recognize your name and see it come in a trusted spot they just don’t trust you.
How tech breaks this is deprioritizes the people in the interactions. Instead of sending messages you use a “like” button to be intelligible to the platform. You don’t see the people putting stuff on your feed, it gets fed to a timeline that cuts it off from all context and atomizes it for your consumption. It’s the UI/UX that drives this. Even compare Reddit and HN with old forums. On forums like 25% of every post is just static bits of self-expression. There’s a PFP, the username is bigger, there’s often a big signature block. All of this makes the peoples’ posts feel like a person talking to you rather than text blocks that happen to have a tiny username and timestamp on it.
My point is that you don't own your handle. Therefore you aren't your handle.
Edit: to clarify: You aren't your handle, because it can be taken away from you, can be injected, blocked, overridden, etc.
My technical rambling then went on about how or when we can make this "handle" decentralized so it cannot be taken away from you. Hard. As proven in practice. Almost impossible.
My name is maintained by a government. It is a "handle" that could be taken away too, but is governed in lots of rules, systems and regulations. My face (an extension of my DNA, I guess) is decentralized and owned by me: its the only handle that afaik no one can take from me.
So in social interactions, you're right: reputation, bound to "me", my face, my DNA is all that matters. But online we don't have this. The closest we can probably get is "my name", controlled by governments.
I think you make a good point and it is well taken. You could be right.
But I still believe that people will care about connecting with an actual person in meatspace. I just can't picture any other result except for complete and total burnout with the fakeness of the web.
I haven't considered this before with SKG, but if this progresses, it means the EU parliament may choose to take action based on an initiative that potentially only a vocal minority supports [0], while coming across as if they were simply following the will of the people.
Not sure how I feel about that, sounds kind of problematic in retrospect. Especially since there's no mechanism for triggering EU-wide referendums to help this AFAIK.
[0] population of the EU: 452 million, unique signatures required for this: 1 million
It would be nice to have a digital referendum on this topic. I could think of some tech that makes it happen, something like a digital ID maybe?
A few things you can legally do online without ID or age verification in the US
1) buy cigars and pipe tobacco (but not cigarettes!)
2) Buy "CBD" by the pound
3) Buy ammunition, a barrel and the rest of gun parts for a glock, except a frame/receiver that can be 3d printed in a few hours to complete it.
4) Order and have delivered wine
But there are people arguing to skip all that and go to straight to ID for social media. It isn't about the children. It's about keeping tabs on who says what.
Usually the delivery person asks for ID when delivering the wine?
They absolutely don't. They ask for your date of birth to fill it on their app and that's it.
For the purpose of the argument, they don't.
#1 isn't entirely true. It's a soft-gate but you are legally required to verify age on your site before completing the purchase (I run a boutique cigar brand [1]).
[1] https://philosophercigars.com
Is teens ordering wine a big issue in the US? Bigger than social media?
Of course not. But literally any excuse that comes to hand will be deployed if it helps the tech industry continue to avoid meaningful consequences. The same handful of companies that have engineered a global surveillance suite that rivals the most tyrannical sovereign governments wildest dreams (and can trivially detect the approximate age of a user) will without a shred of irony deploy legions of paid influencers and other astroturf to decry age verification as an assault on privacy.
But it is an assault on privacy. If "protecting kids" was the goal here they'd push for regulation that forces websites to return standardized metadata that then gets interpreted by the user agent which can be configured by the parent.
Nah, that's a perfectly fine technical solution. Powers that be don't think like that. They understand pulling someone over to check their license, so something like that will do.
Even for a "Citizens' Initiative", this stuff is remarkably tone-deaf. "No Digital ID" ignores the very-real need for people to prove their identity to government(-ish) entities online, and to do so in a reliable, cheap and convenient way. Sure, you do not want that ID to become mandatory for publishing or existing on the Internet in general, but that's a separate discussion: demand sufficient protection for anonymous/pseudonymous posts instead, which is absolutely something that needs to be codified as part of basic human rights.
"No age verification" is even deader-on-arrival. Parents are literally screaming at politicians to protect "the children" (as always), but pretty much everything that has been tried so far to silence those screams has failed (remember PICS, the Platform for Internet Content Selection: that was the last serious contender, and it has been dead for, like, 20 years). Again: demand a way to implement this securely and anonymously, don't take an untenable abolitionist stance or resort to hand-waving in the vague general direction of "parental responsibility": that has been tried, and it's not working anymore.
And, please, stop vilifying the EU in these matters. The UK left the EU, ostensibly so they could make "more sensible laws" in, specifically, respects like these, and they're now leading the assault on basic freedoms with even more fervor. And no, that's not just big-bad-Starmer's fault: it's a preview of what you have to argue against and propose a compromise for instead.
not all parents are screaming this. Only the parents who refuse to parent their children, and conveniently scapegoat society for their parental failings
We cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society.
You could make same exact argument regarding kids health, alcohol abuse, nicotine abuse, all types of addictions, age of consent, and so on.
You can't just have all the safeguards dropped because you think you're doing a good job. Or, even worse, you have no kids and it's your virtues merely projecting.
> We cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society.
From both someone involved in raising kids as well as someone who knows a lot of teachers: none of the involved parties want that. Schools are at best for teaching, but never for raising.
I respectfully disagree. Yes, parents should raise their children as in be present in their lives and help them grow and shape themselves. However, schools with the rules, social engagements, and learning is also a form of raising. Teachers, especially in elementary school, are extremely influential for young kids. How teachers behave when somebody is bullied, how they handle questions, basically how they handle anything, forms the minds of young children.
Is it the sole responsibility of a school to ensure well raised (for whichever specific definition of “well”) children? No. However, they are a large factor in the raising of children.
School was an escape from my home life, but it could never fix my home life. As a child who had no ability to determine what constituted "normal" in order to escape my situation, the only real solution for my home life was for me to be born to different parents. I doubt any amount of legislation would have accomplished that.
I feel like you must have a very restrictive definition of what constitutes “raising” kids if we’re omitting the place where they spend the majority of their waking hours and the people most of their social universe is based in.
We’ve had a live experiment with this during COVID and it’s pretty clear that kids raised solely at home by their parents fared way worse. Not just on academic metrics, but basic conflict resolution or social skills.
Raising almost all children in these government socialist barracks is so dystopian. What you call "worse" conflict resolution and social skills I call superior confidence and autonomy. People today are oversocialized.
It is a parenting issue.
Don't let kids have an internet-connected phone, the same way they can't have a bottle of wine.
If they really need such device make sure that device is locked to a small list of app/contacts possible.
There's no need to lock down the rest of the internet because the responsible person of such kid can't tolerate their complaints. It is a parenting issue.
There is also the influence of the church.
I have seen religious parents been vocally opposed to their children seeing or even discussing anything related to sexuality.
An example from the past:
"The National Legion of Decency, also known as the Catholic Legion of Decency, was an American Catholic group founded in 1934 by the Archbishop of Cincinnati, John T. McNicholas, as an organization dedicated to identifying objectionable content in motion pictures on behalf of Catholic audiences."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_of_Decency
https://www.archbalt.org/catholicism-influenced-moviemaking-...
You have to appreciate the level of audacity required for a catholic organization to claim they are protecting children from harms regarding sexuality.
You totally ignored the point OP was making! Even if it is a parenting issue, simply declaring that will not make parents parent better. It's the same reason why we ban children from drinking wine, because parents cannot be relied upon here.
Unless your point was that we should legally ban kids from handling phones, which I think is too extreme.
But that is my point.
Chase the responsible adult if you see a kid with an overpowered phone, much like you would if you found the same kid with a bottle of wine.
And granted, we don't have locked-enough phone in market yet, but that's a solvable problem if we were to create that market.
Just put your kids in a bubble so not a single adult is the slightest bit inconvenienced by having to exercise any social responsibility for their well being. Easy.
> We cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society.
"It takes a village to raise a child." Except these same parents who won't take care of their kids are also the very first who go all "How dare you speak to my child like that! I'm going to have you fired!"
If your way of talking to kids gets you fired, it was atrocious in the first place. "It takes a village to raise a child." is not about carte blanche to abuse any kid that you encounter.
The saying is about kids watching and learning from their environment - from how adults act. If you set up to be jerk or take advantage of random kids that happen to be around, you are teaching them to take advantage of people. And no amount of yelling "their parents are responsible because they did not stopped me" is going to change that.
So they should be raised by the state just in case? I feel like Ive read this story somewhere...
Parents should be imprisoned if they give children access to the internet. We have to make parents criminally liable. Without a change in incentives, we cannot expect behavior to change. Until then 'parents need to parent' is a slogan and not a solution.
I'm a parent and would rather ban age verification. So it's certainly not everyone...
Right. Care for your children includes the responsibility to keep the society they're eventually going to participate in, free and open.
Loving your children means fighting censorship, not promoting it.
They don’t seem to oppose any of that if you read the intro
> We call on the European Commission to propose legislation ensuring that digital identity and age-assurance systems used to access online services in the Union remain voluntary, privacy-preserving and non-discriminatory. Citizens must not be forced to identify themselves to access lawful online content or services unless strictly necessary, proportionate and provided by law. The legislation should require anonymous or pseudonymous proof-of-age, data minimisation, selective disclosure, open-source implementation, independent security audits, prohibition of cross-service tracking by relying parties, and equivalent alternatives for citizens who do not use a digital wallet.
It has been quite a slippery slope. Services that used to allow password auth have retired them in favour of bank detail login. I can kind of get it, since it's offloading support to the banks, but it's also annoying since the bank logins themselves are a pain to setup, maintain and use (mobile app only).
It would be nice to have some good standard that is less invasive.
At least in Sweden it is because it is a pain to have both bank id and passwords because by contract it is forbidden to allow a user that previous used bankid to ever use password again.
Are you seriously asking to read more than the title from an account created less than 30 minutes ago?
My apologies for joining this community. Do you have any more valuable tips, other than "get lost newbie"?
Welcome! I would recommend to read the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And don’t pay attention to downvotes, that’s part of the game, it’s nothing against you, just accept that sometimes you lose karma :) in some way it’s a good exercise for the ego
While that's fair, would be kinda nice if the title was consistent with the content, instead of being, say, "reach optimized" (populist), wouldn't it?
The intro indeed doesn't sound too bad, but if you read into the underlying demands, the title is actually quite representative of what's going on here.
Specifically, the requirement to provide non-digital alternatives as well as control over relying parties (i.e. consumers of the 'digital ID' and/or 'age verification' APIs) makes all of this a non-starter.
I mean: non-digital alternatives to digital IDs? I guess that means that nobody should be forced to get a digital ID for access to essential government(-ish) services (like banking), and that's a valid point, but in the context of "stop killing the Internet" just obfuscates things.
And control over RPs beyond GDPR is just pushing it, again, quite on purpose.
There are also fascists screaming at the government to do other wildly illegal stuff. The lousy parents begging the government to "tread on me" would get wildly better results by spending less time trying to create an authoritarian state and more time with their kids they claim to care so much about.
They're children. They have the internet access you give them. This isn't some unsolveable problem that needs government intervention, my parents were setting up filters so long ago that they're grandparents now.
I suggest that you don't make the filters to hard to bypass (I would do DNS in both a DNS server and /etc/hosts, along with a browser extension), to encourage them to learn about technology. (although that might stop working due to Ai chatbots)
> my parents were setting up filters
Ah, OK, so you admit a problem exists. That's step one...
And the solution already exists, one that doesn't empower the government to do some truly heinous shit.
Every power you grant the government is another knife they'll eventually stab you in the back with. Maybe you like your current government, but what about the next one, and the one after that?
Instead, just use the tools you already have access to. I was not opposed when California mandated that applications add parental controls, that's fine. If parents want to restrict their children's internet access, there's a continium there ranging from "prudent parenting" to "child abuse", but that can be worked out on a case-by-case basis. I am, however, rabidly against the state requiring you to dox yourself every time you log into a website, because inconceivably lazy parents can't figure out how to use the parental tools that they already have.
Parenting controls are shit on the end device side. It's not working, it's not even trying to. Nobody would need this blanket approach if parenting controls actually worked.
Back when smoking was more normal we basically did leave it up to Big Tobacco to determine how best to tackle underage smoking and they would literally say insane things like “Oh course we’re not targeting elementary school kids! We’re not monsters! Our advertising doesn’t hit them until they’re in 8th grade at least!”
Expecting platform monopolists and dopamine dealers to design for this is folly. They are wired to try to normalize an unhealthy level of dependence on them. Their business model is addiction.
One hour old account advocating for digital identity? And a few other posts here from other accounts doing the same? Is this a psyop?
>Ah, OK, so you admit a problem exists. That's step one...
Okay but for your position to be tenable you have to then go to step 2, which is some parents are incompetent at doing this, and step 3, which is that, nevertheless, their children, who are randomized copies of them genetically, still somehow need and benefit from the filters that their parents can't or won't apply. Then you get to step 4, which is that all of the competent people must suffer so those children can get it from a heavy handed government solution. I don't see how you jointly accept all these steps; it means you want to have a tyranny of the incompetent over the competent. You must jointly assert that they are dumb while placing them up and over the not dumb. That's full on crab-bucket, dysgenics by force ideology.
As far as I know the only thing that influences change is money. What methods could be implemented to take money away from governments that implement with such things? All of my ideas would be very low traction but there are clever people here on HN that I am sure could come up with a few better ideas.
One of my (probably dumb) ideas is:
- Create a legal presence in a country that does not require being dystopian, relaxed business laws, less regulation, lower taxes, move most of the corporate side of the business there. Take the tax revenue with you. It does not have to be all at once. Make the move a slow boil so they don't see it until it's too late.
Which countries, provinces, regions, states have the least regulation, least dystopian behavior and the least taxes? There has to be a incentive for business leaders and board members to move things around. Bonus if the saved money pays for a Gulfstream G650 ER or two.
> What methods could be implemented to take money away from governments that implement with such things?
Right now the most important thing to inhibiting a dystopia is to break the lock Apple and Google have on approval of mobile code, because it gets used as a fulcrum by authoritarians. Want to ban VPNs? Make the app stores do it. Censor social media? Have them ban every social media app that doesn't censor. Want to track everyone everywhere? Make the phone provide sites and apps with a persistent cross-service tracking ID.
Whereas if ordinary people had devices that worked like PCs traditionally have, banning a VPN from the Microsoft store doesn't prevent you from installing one directly from the developer etc.
And getting this to be possible could be done by any sufficiently large market. If a sufficiently large market e.g. bans attestation and enforces antitrust, it allows an open platform to develop in that country by starting with compatibility with the apps of existing platforms, and then that platform can expand into other markets. Or you can get an iPhone there that you can install a VPN on and Apple can't prevent it, and then those iPhones can be exported into authoritarian countries.
And if you want a financial incentive for this, how about every country outside the US not wanting their local businesses paying the 30% tax to a foreign monopolist?
> As far as I know the only thing that influences change is money.
You are incorrect. The NIMBY movement has been extraordinarily successful despite severe opposition from moneyed interests. Bloomberg lost embarrassingly despite setting records for campaign spending. There are countless similar examples.
The NIMBY movement is moneyed interests. The owners of existing real estate zoned for high density don't want more of it because increased supply lowers prices. The people in an affluent suburb don't want affordable condos anywhere in their school district. This comes at the expense of the poor who then pay higher rents.
They control the last mile of the Internet so it would require satellite networking run by another country to cut them out like this.
"I Remember Babylon" by Arthur C. Clarke.
Written in 1960, but very prescient.
Another thing that influences change reliably is a good old (threat of) violence.
I would rather not incite violence on this platform. That just gets a bunch of people put in a cage limiting their career options and potentially "justifies" even greater dystopian actions.
Who are we threatening today?
UA spies on Europeans, and vice versa. Then they share, it's not spying on your citizens, it's called 'intelligence sharing'.
This is bad but it's no reason to adapt a defeatist attitude.
What is UA?
Perhaps they meant United Artists, an evil syndicate hell bent on world domination and film distribution.
United America?
that ended in the 80s
This is funny coming from the EU who brought us cookie banners.
The EU didn't bring us cookie banners, tech companies performing malicious compliance with the EU mandates did