There are also state actors at play here who would love if computing without ID became a very niche thing to do. Obviously their top line would be "fighting terrorism" and "saving the children" but in reality we've seen how these organizations (ICE, NSA, etc.) abuse their power and spy on people without warrants.
tl;dr: there is much more at play here than Facebooks interests alone.
One example of this was last year when high-profile apps like Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans were found to have privacy policies on their websites restricting users to 13+ so they could track and advertise more while their Android and iOS apps were designated for all ages so they could get more downloads.
It seems like a more lucrative path to go down even if you lose the under-18 crowd gambling / watching ads on your platform.
This is likely because of Zuck's testimony in the very recent court case where he testified exactly that the "best place" to do "age verification" was in the operating system.
This was but a few weeks before all these, largely very identical sounding bills, suddenly started appearing in state houses across the USA.
Because meta will not have to spend real $ to add/support age verification, plus they get to point the finger at someone else for age issues.
This is the real benefit to Meta/FB/etc. that many seem to overlook. Meta/FB/etc. are already staring down a lot of court cases related to "addicting youngsters" to their product (and potentially a lot [i.e. billions of dollars] of payout for settlements or penalties in cases that side against them).
But, if they can get the government to mandate that the operating system is responsible for verifying a user's age, they get to avoid liability (i.e., more billions of dollars) for serving anything from their properties to an underage user if the OS tells them that the user is "old enough" for whatever they served. So long as Meta follows the law and asks the OS "is this user old enough" and if the OS replies "old enough" then the liability for mistakes in the age identification shifts to the OS provider and away from Meta/etc.
The part that is odd here is why Microsoft, Apple and Google (the "OS providers" truly being targeted) are not massively lobbying against this due to the legal liability risk that Meta is trying to shift over to them.
Requiring disclosure of my age is effectively a search, without specific probable cause, and there are no means for me to challenge this in court.
Settled law decades ago.
On that note, today is April 15th, tax day. The day where if you don’t provide hard numbers about your life against your will and at your own expense, prison opens as a possibility.
Even if they stack the courts with muppets who ignore the obvious first amendment angle to get this passed, I will never comply with this and I will happily help others defy it.
Besides, you’re comparing apples to oranges. Cigarettes are a physical product, not a form of expression. Code is speech and compelled speech violates the first amendment. That makes even state laws for OS age verification unconstitutional.
The first amendment does not blanket ban compelled speech. You can be compelled to testify against someone if granted immunity. You can be forced to take an oath or affirmation in court. I'm sure there are other examples.
> The laws about giving (not selling) tobacco to minors are state laws, not federal. There’s no interstate commerce there or here.
If multiple states have differing legislation over the same area of commerce, it can affect interstate commerce. But anyway, after Wickard v Fiilburn interstate commerce is never not implicated.
> An Ohio farmer, Roscoe Filburn, was growing wheat to feed animals on his own farm. The U.S. government had established limits on wheat production, based on the acreage owned by a farmer, to stabilize wheat prices and supplies.
> Filburn grew more than was permitted and so was ordered to pay a penalty. In response, he said that because his wheat was not sold, it could not be regulated as commerce, let alone "interstate" commerce (described in the Constitution as "Commerce ... among the several states").
> The Supreme Court disagreed: "Whether the subject of the regulation in question was 'production', 'consumption', or 'marketing' is, therefore, not material for purposes of deciding the question of federal power before us. ... But even if appellee's activity be local and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce and this irrespective of whether such effect is what might at some earlier time have been defined as 'direct' or 'indirect'."[2]
> Wickard v Fiilburn
A bad decision that is slowly being undermined and which will eventually be overturned. The State is not omnipotent.
Good luck getting standing to challenge the law within 90 days.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/7270...
Maybe add in automatic voter registration to sweeten the pot?
There's a reason this idea is pushed solely by Republicans with the explicit goal of reducing the number of people who can vote, because fewer people voting is better for Republicans.
Most negative US health outcome factors can be traced to suburbanization, which is also where the vast majority of the gun violence is, and systemic racial wealth disparity. We have a pretty good healthcare system, we just need to subsidize it for people who can't afford it.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but that's how your comment reads.
Do those lucky people have healthcare insurance tied to their employment? Are they afraid to go to a demonstration or advocate a union, because they could lose their job and thus healthcare?
A good healthcare system treats everyone equally, no matter where they live in a country, their income level, being employed/unemployed, etc.
We have a pretty good healthcare system, we just need to subsidize it for people who can't afford it.
No, it is broken. The US healthcare capita costs twice as much per capita as most West European countries and the 'outcomes per capita' are worse. The problem is, similar to the prison system etc., the privatization of the system. It's run by companies that go for profit maximization, which entails rejecting as many claims as possible, driving up medicine prices, etc.
Too early to discuss much though?
Obviously we are facing a population crisis, and we will need more bodies for the factories and retirement homes. Or at least this was the idea in the 1800s. We might have morally coated it with religion, but biopower is a real thing.
The current hypothesis is that the ever evolving LGBTQ+ is a way to sell niche products to these groups. You can imagine that with every new gender, there is a facebook ad and amazon order to be sold.
I don't really believe this, I'm an anti-realist and I think continental philosophy is BS... but this is a classic. Also, there are sooo many ways our sexual taboos are all about economics. Once you see it, you cant unsee.
One of the prongs is requiring ID to go online. Another is to use a combination of media mergers with 'voluntary' government-controlled self-censorship to clamp down on unregulated speech.
So, its blast radius will be centered on LGBTQ issues, but it's designed to cover your comment too.
It also doesn’t make sense a Democrat from New Jersey writing the bill saw it that way at all.
There are so many issues with how this can work in practice. Best case it just asks how old you are like a website that shows mature content, and the user lies. So from a liability perspective that shifts it to the user who gave false information. Beyond that there’s no practical way to actually verify someone’s age at the OS level.
KYC for windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, and internet players like Google and Cloudflare being forced to block unverified devices.
There probably would still be a way around it, but it would be a headache for most people.
That is a _very_ dangerous assumption.
Committee members can be found here: https://energycommerce.house.gov/representatives
The latest absurd power grab in the guise of protecting the children.
https://linuxiac.com/systemd-creator-lennart-poettering-join...
The cynic in me says the Win 11 "you must have a TPM" push (along with passkey's "big tech owns all your accounts" design) were rammed through specifically to centralize control of the open web.
At this point, if the federal government actually forced OS-level censorship, most literate folks would just download Linux. So, first, they need to close the remaining door.
I'm not exactly holding a candle for debian. SystemD has already started adding support for this, and, in the past, downstream has been able to force unpopular debian votes through.
Lets hope they carve out exemptions for Free Operating Systems based upon revenue. But we know that will not happen.