This has nothing to do with porn or protecting children. It's a backdoor way to attach names and faces to VPN usage so movie and music studios can sue specific people for torrenting. They failed in bringing lawsuits previously because they couldn't pin point the piracy to specific individuals. I would bet money that the ministers leading this charge have ties to groups in the movie and music industry. The UK will be the testbed before the full rollout in the EU and then worldwide.

If you want to actually play devil's advocate, you gotta give an argument. Otherwise, you're just being contrarian.

Ok one question: Why do we have to protect children from porn if they've already gotten exposed to it?

If I had to guess, they don’t care at all about porn and are using this as a pretext to censor sites that talk about LGBTQIA+ people.

Transgender people are in the crosshairs and have been for a couple of years for now.

This is fascists using "think of the children" to violate everyone's online privacy and spy on everyone worldwide.

The irony is that despite being a confessional state, the UK is 100x more secular than the USA.

This is a lot bigger than the entertainment industry now. Creeping fascism and the trillion dollar surveillance capitalism industry are hellish bed buddies.

It makes these kids easy marks for malware.

I'd say it has more to do with pandering to religious conservatives to keep them in their pocket.

So they have more time to watch people shooting each other.

Let me give you one, kids try to explore topics out of curiosity. They are probably not going to look up someone torturing animals, because they don't want to see that. Kids usually look up and explore things they are ready for. Also "kids" is a pretty diverse group, a 5 year old and a 15 year old kid are very different.

For real young kids parents should monitor online behavior anyway. For teens, how is life this different than looking at a playboy or a porn tape. Teens have been doing that forever, the people creating these laws probably did that when they where kids.

It's probably a lot better to let kids (teens) explore nudity and sex in a safe environment, instead of letting them go unsupervised in places that ignore the law.

It's basically the same argument with drugs, offering legal options vs. going to a dealer and possibly getting much more dangerous drugs mixed in.

My vote is smoke screen, lots of nasty stuff can fly under the radar with all this talk on porn, vpn and privacy rights

To add to it: Why do we need to protect children that arent ours from things their parents are supposed to protect them from?

Weird way to shift job tasks around.

Not all bans are bad or hurt law abiding citizens. Slavery and gambling come to mind, both still exist illegally (or, in the case of gambling, semi-legally, what with the deluge of sports betting and online casinos HQd in shitty countries), but I would say them being illegal is a net positive for society.

From my small understanding, usenet was like several forums loosely connected to one another, many servers are used mainly for filesharing. Every time I've checked some servers, all of them had a paywall to create an account.

I know, it just bothers me how little they're trying to hide it.

It's happening due to a big child sexualization/adultization scandal that took forever to blow up^[While instagram itself has some "moderation", they'll happily turn a blind eye to anything that could hurt engagement. 10yo girls doing extremely sexual dances with pornographic music in the background? Boost that shit, look at the engagement!!! Tiktok is equally at fault for the same reason. This shit has been going for years and predates Hytalo and Felca.]. When the deputies came up with a law that was ready and just sitting in a drawer, my mind immediately went "Oh, fuck". I still gotta read it, because it was approved recently.

Eh, I disagree. Slavery being banned is obviously a good thing, but that's because it's immoral to own someone else, so it's essentially just kidnapping. Gambling, on the other hand, shouldn't be banned for the simple reason that consenting adults should be able to do it if they choose.

Basically, I believe there are two types of rights:

• negative rights - restricts others from preventing individuals from doing things to you (e.g. freedom from slavery, freedom to gamble, etc)
• positive rights - forces others to provide goods or services to you (e.g. free healthcare, right to counsel, etc)

I believe nobody should gamble because it's a poor financial decision and very addictive (and I choose to avoid gambling), but I also believe you should be allowed to gamble, and the government should ensure that companies that provide gambling services do so fairly (i.e. advertisements about win-rates and whatnot are accurate).

So yes, if gambling wasn't allowed, people w/ addictions would be better off, but those who aren't at risk of gambling addiction would be harmed due to restrictions on their freedom. So the question is, do we want government to protect us from ourselves, or merely provide a safety net for when we screw up? I'm absolutely in the latter camp, and I think we should use taxes to fund recovery programs for addictive behaviors in lieu of banning them. In general, I think a tax is way more rights-respecting than a ban.

if the strategy is to tell children to stop circumventing the rules with a workaround, couldn’t the original messaging just have been “talk to your children about not watching porn”

it’s so obvious the identification laws have nothing to do with protecting children from porn and everything to do with Big Brother surveillance

It's funny how all the bigwigs are suddenly interested in "child safety" now that ol Eppie is gone, funny that. Also at least kids are learning how stick it to those old sacks for trying to take away their freedom.