> Another questionable measure by Government to protect our mollycoddled, insufficiently-resilient society

Complains about mollycoddling.

> a better approach would be to limit

Immediately proposes new mollycoddling scheme.

> That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access.

This wouldn't allow them to watch gambling ads or enjoy murdoch venues.

> That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access.

Why should this be the government's responsibility rather than the parents'?

> Thinking back to my teenage years I'm almost certain I would have been tempted to waste too much time online when it would have been better for me to be doing homework or playing sport.

That is true. I spent my time coding a 2D game engine on an 486, it eventually went nowhere, but it was still cool to do. But if I had the internet then, all that energy would have been put into pointless internet stuff.

I'm in Australia too.

I feel a lot of Australians think the government is more mollycoddling than it is, it's hard to think of an actual policy in Australia that is outside of the norm of the Western world.

My take is just like we have allowance to introduce children to the concept of money, parents could use data allowance to introduce children to the concept of the internet.

The worst content out there is typically data-heavy, the best - not necessarily, as it can well be text in most cases.

Australian gov can’t even enforce vape ban, how you’d expect smartphone ban to be enforced?

I find I am broadly supportive of these laws (The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024), even if this specific regulation is a bit of pearl clutching wowserism.

Why? If you read the original legislation https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display....

You get 30,000 civil penalty units if you are a scumbag social media network and you harvest someone's government ID. You get 30,000 civil penalty units if you don't try to keep young kids away from the toxic cesspool that is your service, filled with bots and boomers raving about climate change and reposting Sky News.

This absolutely stuffs those businesses who prey on their users, at least for the formative years.

And when I think about it like that? I have no problem with it, nor the fact it's a pain to implement.

100% agree.

The framing that explicit material is bad for kids, while probably true, is besides the point. Lots of things a parent could expose a child to could be bad, but it's always been seen as up to the parent to decide.

What the government should do is ensure that parents have the tools to raise their kids in the way they feel is appropriate. For example, they could require device manufactures implement child-modes or that ISP provide tools for content moderation which would puts parents in control. This instead places the the state in the parental role with it's entire citizenry.

We see this in the UK a lot too. This idea that parents can't be trusted to be good parents and that people can't be trusted with their own freedom so we need the state to look after us seems to be an increasing popular view. I despise it, but for whatever reason that seems to be the trend in the West today – people want the state to take on a parental role in their lives. Perhaps aging demographics has something to do with it.

> That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access.

This would be completely and utterly unenforceable in any capacity. Budget smartphones are cheap enough and ubiquitious enough that children don't need your permission or help to get one. Just as I didnt need my parents assistance to have three different mobile phones in high school when as far as they knew, I had zero phones.

[flagged]

Mate...

> 2038: all visits to all sites will be recorded

That's been the case since 2015. ISPs are required to record customer ID, record date, time and IP address and retain it for two years to be accessed by government agencies. It was meant to be gated by warrants, but a bunch of non-law-enforcement entities applied for warrantless access, including local councils, the RSPCA (animal protection charity), and fucking greyhound racing. It's ancient history, so I'm not sure if they were able to do so. The abuse loopholes might finally be closed up soon though.

https://privacy108.com.au/insights/metadata-access/

https://delimiter.com.au/2016/01/18/61-agencies-apply-for-me...

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-18/government-releases-l...

https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2023/government-acts-to-finall...

> 2042: your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case

We already reached that point several years ago.

> 2039: this list of sites cannot be visited by any Australian of any age

Block lists are not new. For example Italy blocks a number of sites, usually at DNS level with the cooperation of ISPs and DNS services. You can autotranslate this article from 2024 to get the gist of what is being blocked and why https://www.money.it/elenco-siti-vietati-italia-vengono-pers...

I believe other countries of the same area block sites for similar reasons.

My understanding of US current policy:

> your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case

Already the case. Mostly for the kind of dumb criminal who is suspected of murder and has been found googling "defences to murder" and "how to hide a body".

> the companies providing the logins must provide government with the identities

If there's a court order (good) or a national security letter (occasionally good but very open to abuse). Maybe the NSA or some guy in DOGE has automatic API access to this data anyway.

> you must be logged in to visit these specific sites where you might see naked boobies, and if you're under age you can't - those sites must enforce logins and age limits

Already the case for youtube and reddit content marked NSFW - either by the creator or by a fairly stupid algorithm. (You can see these boobies, but not those ones.) But the age verification is mostly "open a new account and enter a birth date". Also reddit has the dumbest age verification/login bypass ever. (Your honor, editing an URL is nation-state level hacking and we can't reasonably defend against that.)

> all visits to all sites will be recorded

Something something Permanent Record.

> you must have a valid login with one of these providers in order to use the internet

Ok this one is cheating a bit, but don't you need a google (or samsung etc.) account to set up an android let alone access the internet?

Also cheating a bit but you need a login and contract with your ISP to get on the internet too.

Australian politicians, police, and a specific chunk of the population would be exempt from this... like with privacy laws.

As others have pointed out how many of these are already present here. I suspect the rest of your time line is far to optimistic in how long it will take to get there. I suspect that with the pace of decline most of that will be enacted in the next 5 years.

I would like to say "It is all because of X political party!" but both the majors are the same in this regard and they usually vote unanimously on these things.

> 2030: you must be logged in to visit these specific sites where you might see naked boobies, and if you're under age you can't - those sites must enforce logins and age limits

Some states in the US are doing this already. And I think I saw a headline about some country in Europe trying to put Twitter in that category, implying they have such rules there already.

2027: ufos visit, and decide to end the human experiment, game over.

> your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case

Pretty sure google searches have been used in murder trials before, including the mushroom poisoning one going on right now in Victoria.

> Australia is quietly extremely authoritarian.

Not quietly, I don't think. Not like Australia is known for freedom and human rights. It's known for expeditionary wars, human rights abuses, jailing whistleblowers and protesters, protecting war criminals, environmental and social destruction, and following the United States like a puppy.

> your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case

As others have said, that's the case already and not just in Australia. Same in lots of other places like the UK and the whole EU. Less so in the US (though they can demand any data the ISP has, and require ISPs to collect data on individuals)

> Australia is quietly extremely authoritarian.

It is weird, as a recent-ish migrant I do agree, there are rules for absolutely bloody everything here and the population seems in general to be very keen on "Ban it!" as a solution to everything.

It's also rife with regulatory capture - Ah, no mate, you can't change that light fitting yourself, gotta get a registered sparky in for that or you can cop a huge fine. New tap? You have to be kidding me, no, you need a registered plumber to do anything more than plunger your toilet, and we only just legalised that in Western Australia last year.

It's been said before, but at some point the great Aussie Larrikin just died. The Wowsers won and most of them don't even know they're wowsers.

If only there was a name for this fallacy. Something slope something

> there is a view that foreign internet behemoths have failed to moderate for themselves and will therefore have moderation imposed on them however imperfect.

This view is manufactured. The premise is that better moderation is available and despite that, literally no one is choosing to do it. The fact is that moderation is hard and in particular excluding all actually bad things without also having a catastrophically high false positive rate is infeasible.

But the people who are the primary victims of the false positives and the people who want the bad stuff fully censored aren't all the same people, and then the second group likes to pretend that there is a magic solution that doesn't throw the first group under the bus, so they can throw the first group under the bus.

I'm split on it. 100% agree that kids being off social media is better for society. But I can't see how it could be enforced without privacy implications for adults.

If you read through the issues that ASIO says they are most concerned about, it’s clear that companies like Meta have a lot to answer for.

https://www.intelligence.gov.au/news/asio-annual-threat-asse...

https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display....

Read the legislation. Ask yourself if it's better for a country's government or a foreign set of social media companies to control what young people see. One has a profit motive above all else. One can be at least voted for or against.

It's what happens when the people governing is terrified about the people they govern.

> vaguely repressive surveillance

It's authoritarianism, and frankly paving the way for fascism. People are already getting visits from the police for unsavory Facebook posts. Be careful not to criticize your government online, because soon every post will be instantly judged by an AI system and you'll be flagged as a disobedient citizen in need of a bit of the old boot.

I think lawmakers gravitate towards "required identification" because 1) it's easier to put blame on a single website than on whatever browser + the websites 2) it matches th experience of age restriction for movies and magazines, where age is enforced by whoever sells you the thing or allows access 3) client side restrictions seem easier to circumvent 4) some lawmakers probably think grown ups shouldn't watch porn either.

IMO an "ok" solution to the parents' requirements of "I want my kids to not watch disturbing things" might be to enforce domain tags (violence, sex, guns, religion, social media, drugs, gambling, whatever) and allow ISPs to set filters per paying client, so people don't have to setup filters on their own (but they can).

But it's a complex topic, and IMO a simpler solution is to just not let kids alone in the internet until you trust them enough.

Well the age assurance is only for logged-in users, so they can just log out.

I guess they should just succumb to the US big tech machine without trying anything. I get the sentiment thought, maybe doing something that won't work is worse than doing nothing.

Do you suppose this is born of a desire to more easily identify people, or primarily as a regulatory fence to prevent upstart competitors? Perhaps both?

Yes. As usual people commenting based on their biases instead of comprehending the text. This is a proposal made by predominantly US companies (a country that actually has mandatory proof of age to access digital services in several states) to a US born eSafety commissioner who previously worked for Microsoft, Adobe and Twitter.

Not really sure what this has to do with the Australian government or Australian people. We can't even properly tax these foreign companies fairly. If we did try to regulate them the US government would step in and play the victim despite a massively one sided balance of trade due to US services being shoved down our throats. We need to aggressively pursue digital sovereignty.

"eKaren" is shorter

Meh, this is minor political fluff. Australia is still doing quite good.

I’m an Australian who values privacy and civil liberties more than most I meet, and that's why I think this bill is horrible, is full of unintended consequences, and will be worked around by kids who care to do it.

"I’m an Australian who values privacy and civil liberties more than most I meet."

Same here. Early on, if I found a site interesting I'd often follow its links to other sites and so on down into places that the Establishment would deem unacceptable but I'd not worry too much about it.

Nowadays, I just assume authorities of all types are hovering over every mouse click I make. Not only is this horrible but it also robbs one of one's autonomy.

It won't be long before we're handing info that was once commonplace in textbooks around in secret.

Aren't privacy and civil liberties fundamentally at odds with centralized government issued ID checks? How can you claim to value the former while supporting a plan to require the latter?

In the days before electronics were endemic, physically checking a photo ID didn't run afoul of that as long as the person checking didn't record the serial number. But that's no longer the world we live in.

I don't understand why you think this bill and that phenomenon (the fact that Xitter or Facebook aren't like the old days of the internet) are connected, can you explain why you think this, please?

Evidently the bar for valuing such things is set very low in Australia.

This is the account's first message here in two years

The AI-based version of this looks fine, the ID checks are odd though

>I think this bill is a good thing and I support it.

Uhuh.

>I’m an Australian who values privacy and civil liberties more than most I meet.

No you're not.

Are you sure you value privacy and civil liberties then if you fall for "Think of the Children" bollocks instead of wanting to throw politicians down wells to protect children from living in a dystopia?

> However, users who are not logged in should also expect “default blurring of images of online pornography and high-impact violence material detected in search results”.

To be fair, most of the concern is about stuff that's far more hard-core than "titties"

I predict Lower.

Unrelated, but why I don't agree:

The systems which permit voting down stupid laws also permit voting down good laws. This is very "be careful what you wish for" and reductive to "the voter is always right even when they want stupid things" interpretation of democracy.

E.g. Swiss cantons opposing votes for women inside the last 2 decades.

It uses a video feed and asks you to look in certain directions. At least the one instance I've encountered did.

Yep, it took me a while to find that.

> They all act like they're living in soviet russia

Nothing says “not living in Soviet Russia” like having to show your papers to access information.

As an Australian citizen I'm not fully in favour of this. But I think I agree that we need some protection from companies like Meta/Google etc influencing our youth based on the American political "situation".

Better I give a little bit of pii than some kid grows up too early.

And at no point does it ever occur to you to demand proof that measures such as this will have the desired effect... or, indeed, that the desired effect is indeed worth achieving at all.