The
UK's new online identification requirement will effectively
require all discussion platforms and search engines to verify the age of each user.
The obvious way to do that is a repressive and
tyrannical way: by making each user show government photo ID.
I reject commercial communications platforms, because they already
deny users' freedom in various ways &msdash; instance, by demanding to
identify the user and/or running their code in the user's computer.
However, there are commercial search engines that currently do nothing
wrong to the user. Will this law make them all engage in repression?
Does the age verification requirement apply to search engines?
GNU Taler can be used to give people a way to verify their ages to
a web site without giving the site any way to identify them. But this
is not entirely finished yet.
The _goals_ of this bill mostly seem valid to me; indeed, they may not
go far enough. For instance, TikTok's practices seem to reduce
teenagers' attention spans; should those practices be banned? I am
not sure. However, the internet is a threat to democracy if tracks
what people do and where they go.