So, OS-level age-gating is going federal, which will effectively kill your rights to device ownership and what’s left of free speech and expression.
Enjoy your free speech while you still have it because this is a clear attempt to erase that right.
SOPA never died, it just went into hiding until time to reemerge, and now’s that time, this is basically SOPA in a save the kids trenchcoat.
Or you could install an non US OS
We can’t kid ourselves that it would stop with the US. It’s too much of a low hanging fruit for governmental overreach.
Exactly! The EU will be next!
I would argue this framing is at the root cause of the such initiatives.
The government even in flawed democracies (and not only in democracies) is generally a representation of the attitude of the people. Governmental overreach stems from the behaviour and beliefs of the adult population.
If a median representation of the population supports oligarchs, you’ll get oligarch programs under the guise of “think about the children” initiatives. Polemics about “small government” aren’t going to help.
But tbh I really wonder how would this even in open source. We can just strip out the age verification part and call it a day.
I’d guess part of the plan is that it wouldn’t.