What stops

Not useful to look at it in such a black or white manner. The possibilities are presumably less, and surely not that obvious.

I too have been screaming about private online since the 90s. I have an intuitive reaction that sort of mirrors yours.

But can I ask you a question?

And it’s one that I’m asking because I genuinely wish to learn from others.

Because I can’t quite see the difference and maybe there’s something I’m missing.

Why is it not government overreach to ensure pornography isn’t sold to minors in an adult video store, but government overreach to have the same expectation of online pornography providers?

I would love your enlightened view on this so I can learn from it. Because I can’t quite see the difference.

I understand that many adults go into an adult video store and need not prove their age, because they clearly look like adults.

And so the difference here is that everyone have to prove their age online, even people that are clearly adults by how they look.

But entering a pornography website is the equivalent of entering an adult video store where the clerk cannot see you, cannot hear your voice. In that world I would also expect the clerk to check every purchase as they would have no other means of assessing the buyer’s age.

Or maybe you think that adult videos should be sold to everyone and it’s the very concept that pornography is restricted to minors that you disagree with. I don’t personally hold that view but then I can least understand why you would also reject online age verification.

Or maybe you think it is ineffective and won’t make a difference. That argument I most definitely agree with, but how we choose to implement a law, and whether it’s effective, is two different discussions I would posit.

Edit: I love that I’m getting downvoted for expressing a POV respectfully.

It's almost like this law was made to preserve the Meta monopoly. Starting a social media platform just got more expensive and complicated.

It's just a logical extension of what happens when government becomes the arbitrator of all.

The biggest issue is that so many people see it just as you do, left vs right, instead of liberty vs authoritarianism.

For decades, the libertarian movement, as seen by the left, has been largely associated with the right, simply because of their professed support of the free market, and dislike of gun control

But that same movement has been seen by the right as largely associated with the left, because of their views on things like the drug war, enforced morality, and anti-corporatism.

Has there been a large shift of alt-right into the libertarian movement over the past few years? Yes. Absolutely. And I despise it with a passion.

But there are still quite a lot of us truly anti-authoritarian libertarians out there who despise both left, and right leaning authoritarianism.

But when I bring up issues of authoritarianism, I get "BoTh SiDeS?!" bullshit responses. Because YES, as we can see, BOTH SIDES do their own fair share of this authoritarian bullshit.

They differ in methods, yes. But the bottom line is an encroachment on personal privacy. Plus, property rights are just a logical extension of personal privacy rights.

There is no possible way to actually stop teenagers accessing online porn that doesn't require such a massive invasion of privacy that it leaves no safe way for adults to access it. To go with your adult video store analogy, it's like if the store staff would have to accompany you home and watch you watching the porn to check there wasn't anyone standing behind you also looking at the screen, and while they were there, they were supposed to take notes on everything they saw. Even if they had no interest in doing anything nefarious, a criminal could steal their notebook and blackmail all their customers with the details it contained, and there'd be enough proof that there wouldn't be any way to plausibly claim the blackmailer had just made everything up.

If you want to prove someone on the Internet is a real adult and not a determined teenager, you need lots of layers. E.g. if you just ask for a photo of an ID card, that can be defeated by a photo of someone else's ID card, and a video of a face can be defeated by a video game character (potentially even one made to resemble the person whose ID has been copied). You need to prove there's an ID card that belongs to a real person and that it's that person who is using it, and that's both easier to fake than going to a store with a fake ID (if you look young, they'll be suspicious of your ID) or Mission Impossible mask, and unlike in a store, the customer can't see that you're not making a copy of the ID card for later blackmail or targeted advertisements. No one would go back to a porn shop that asked for a home address and a bank statement to prove it.

Another big factor is that if there's a physical shop supplying porn to children, the police will notice and stop it, but online, it's really easy to make a website and fly under the radar. It's pretty easy for sites that don't care about the law to provide an indefinite supply of porn to children, and once that's happening, there's no reason to think that it's only going to be legal porn just being supplied to the wrong people.

Overall, the risk of showing porn to children doesn't go down very much, but the risk of showing blackmailable data to criminals and showing particularly extreme and illegal porn to children goes up by a lot. Protecting children from extreme material, e.g. videos of real necrophilia and rape, which are widely accepted to be seriously harmful, should be a higher priority than protecting a larger number from less extreme material that the evidence says is less harmful, if at all. Even if it's taken as fact that any exposure to porn is always harmful to minors, the policies that are possible to implement in the real world can't prevent it, just add either extra hassle or opportunities for even worse things to happen. There hasn't been any proposal by any government with a chance of doing more good than harm.

In Finland you could handle this by having people authenticate using their online bank passwords. A LOT of government stuff already works that way, so it would require almost no extra coding at least over here. I wonder why it cannot be done the same way in England?

That's the reason I wrote what I wrote. everyone only knows what they need to know. How do you think a third entity would identify you?

The right is typically for gun control. Only one country comes to my mind where they aren't. Which one were you thinking about? Or is it more common than I thought?

(Or did you just happen to forget that 95 % of Earth's population exists?)

EDIT: Oh, and also: It is important to keep in mind that it's the same within the left. There are also left-wingers who prefer authoritarianism and ones who despise it. I do agree with your sentiment: The left-right division does not work very well in our current world. Need to take best parts of everything, but most importantly, make sure we don't end up under totalitarian rule!

• Teenagers can find out their parents' passwords (or their friends' parents' passwords) if they really want to, and if things are anonymous enough not to leave a paper trail that would allow spouses to see each other's porn usage, they're anonymous enough to let teenagers hide that they're using their parents' credentials. 2FA helps, but it's not like teenagers never see their parents' phones.
• There's not anything that all adults in the UK have that could be used for everyone. There's no unified national ID or online government identity. There's no one-size-fits-all bank login system. You'd have to build and secure tens of independent systems to cover nearly all adults.
• As I said in the post above, if it's too much hassle for teenagers to access mainstream, legitimate porn sites, then there's very little anyone can do to stop them accessing obscure ones that don't care about obeying the law or can't do so competently. If governments could stop websites from existing and providing content, there wouldn't be any online piracy.

This is exactly the kind of government overreach people like me have been screaming about since, in my case, the 1990s.

"I told you so" just doesn't feel so good when what's happening is nothing less than the entirety of human freedom and liberty is being eroded before our very eyes, and those who disagree with it get labeled as kooks, and accused of hating whatever "oppressed group" of the day is in vogue.

Then let me summarize:

care 'bout kids? gaza kids?

How do you think a third entity would identify you?

You may want to join us reading along in the privacy communities of the fediverse.

But long story shortened - third parties are very much identifying each of us in staggeringly novel and effective ways.

For example, depending on circumstances, third parties may not be sure which room in my home I am sitting in, right now, while being aware that I'm writing this. This shit has gotten deeply weird and invasive.

Parents have the ultimate say-so of what their kids have access to.

I don't believe there needs to be a law that says that, no.

If a parent decides their kid is responsible enough to have their own money, then it's the parents who are to blame if that kid buys "bad" things with that money.

Same thing online. If a parent decides their kid is responsible enough to have unrestricted internet access, then it's their fault if the kid then goes to a "bad" website.

It's not the store's fault. Nor is it the website's fault.

We have given away far too much of our parental responsibility over to 3rd parties, and now we don't know how to parent anymore.

Not OP, but I think the analogy to what is happening to online privacy would be if you were asked to identify yourself at every location: the grocery store, the farmers market, the corner park, the trail along the river; and all of those checkpoints were aggregated and sold, meaning that someone who might not have your best interests at heart could use your travel timeline against you, to advertise to you, to sue you, to charge you with a crime, to destroy your public reputation.

Because I can’t quite see the difference

Parents can (and MUST) monitor what happens in their home. It was expected for the past thousand years, and now it's the duty of everyone to take care of anyone's children for some reason. To get to a porn store, you need money to take the bus or you need a car, then the owner of the store can kick your ass or call the cops if you're underage. Remember that less than 50 years ago, the local priest could smash your face if you didn't behave properly in the street, With the internet, parents are the sole responsible for what their kids do, but they don't want to take any responsibility for it. The solution would be a mandatory parental control on every computer, but parents wouldn't like that.

government overreach to have the same expectation of online pornography providers

Because that overreach happens to remove all my privacy thanks to a few idiot parents who don't want to do their parenting jobs in another country, and I consider that unacceptable. We can do some whataboutism and say that since parents in Afghanistan don't want to watch porn, all the porn of the internet has to disappear. Same for blasphemy and freedom of women to browse the internet.

Ok. I get the concept that pornography doesn’t harm children. We can debate that.

But by that reckoning should we also allow children to buy guns online and have them delivered at home? Is there nothing we want to restrict online, on account that whoever is buying it might be too young?

Eh, Denmark is. They are building exactly a ZKP system.

Britain has chosen to not make this a legal requirement so it is possible to tie back age verification with who verified. That makes it a lot more suspect.

I said "professed" dislike. Yes, I know Reagan is responsible for one of the largest expansions of gun control ever seen in the US...

And yes, I know Marx himself was tremendously in favor of armed workers.

Doesn't change political narrative being pushed by both major political parties in the US, where in the left supposedly wants guns banned, and the right wants everyone armed.

Yes, I know things aren't that cut and dry, but the media narrative pushed by both parties definitely seems to say that it is.

So you would also support a child buying alcohol online on account of being given money and access to the internet?

Doesn’t change political narrative being pushed by both major political parties in the US, where in the left supposedly wants guns banned, and the right wants everyone armed.

How is US relevant in this discussion?