They’re more like taxes than rents. It’s a constant cost applied to all goods because of the ubiquity of use means we pay with or without playing the credit card/payments game.
So in red states porn is being used, and in blue states TikTok and Instagram are being used. Is anyone tracking who is behind the concerted efforts here? For example, which organizations, executives, lobbyists and politicians are valid and responsible parties?
Meta is one of the biggest ones pushing for this, because they don't want to be accountable so these types of laws pass the buck onto the delivery platforms (Apple, Google, other OSes)
Meta is then funding/lobbying alongside a bunch of other conservative groups like Heritage Action, and the digital childhood alliance (also made up of a ton of other conservative lobbying groups)
> Separately, and for very different reasons, NetChoice, the trade group that counts companies like Google and Meta among its members, filed testimony opposing the same bill. Its objection was First Amendment law and the risk of exposing sensitive user data, not open source specifically. It’s an odd pairing: a digital rights nonprofit and the lobbying arm for the platforms the bill is supposed to be regulating, arguing against the same bill for opposite reasons. Illinois lawmakers passed it unanimously anyway.
Sure, but Meta also wouldn't mind if age verification of some kind were used, because it would just increase the moat they already have. Meta or Google would have no difficulty complying with any of these laws regardless of how extreme they are, while the mom and pop shops can't comply and are forced out of business.
I have read this before, and while I do not disagree, I am about 100% convinced that this is NOT confined to merely facebook doing bribes. The reason I say this is because you can see many different countries all becoming victim to age sniffing. While in theory a single huge corporation could do that, I am pretty certain that this is NOT only facebook pulling the money-string here.
Oh yeah, of course Meta isn't the only one pushing for it, they are just one of the largest contributors in support of these legislations, generally. More specifically, it's governments coming up with these laws. Meta's lobbying is trying to make sure the laws stay focused on the app store's & OSes, rather than requiring social media and individual websites/services doing the age gating. Facebook does not want to police itself or its content.
Tech incumbents whose businesses are reliant on selling ad space need to designate who is a verified human on the internet as soon as possible or their businesses go to zero once the entire web is AI bots and all the traffic is fraudulent and worthless, so they have to play as many angles as they can to achieve this.
That's not how ads work. They're done on a bidding system. If the value of each ad impression / click goes down, the bids will go down, but their total revenue would stay the same. It'd have basically zero effect.
I used to run a parental controls startup and after talking to lots of parents, I can tell you this sentiment is shared among most parents. Parents on both sides of the isle think they're going to keep their teenagers off the internet forever, I had parents look me straight in the face and say their child wouldn't be allowed online until she was 16.
Parents aren't interested in the nuance of good and bad guys, they see the internet, think it's too much trouble to keep around, and want it blocked. I suspect politicians are just mimicking this sentiment after talking to thousands of parents
> they see the internet, it's too much trouble to keep around, and want it blocked
I can sympathize with this sentiment
in my work and life and personal life the internet is very useful, but as a parent of children and young teens, the internet is really just a PITA that I wish would go away along with all of the games, social media sites, and everything that I have to expend so much energy educating / arguing / instructing / fighting / blocking with my kids about.
It's exhausting because it's everywhere pushing at them from every direction. It's like trying to teach your kids the hazards of cigarettes or vaping to your kids while cool cig pushers are standing in their bedroom talking to them and waiting for them every time they walk out the door.
So yeah, expect exhausted parents who never asked for the deluge of slop, to be supportive of bills -- as ill-conceived or intentioned as they may be -- that provide relief.
And lest you say, "oh but it's always been that way, before this it was the early internet, and video games, and cigarettes". I grew up through all of that, and I can tell you it is not at all the same today. The ubiquitousness of it is what makes all the difference.
You raise an interesting point in the first sentence. It might be that age sniffing could actually violate the US constitution.
As for lobbyists: I think we can probably determine the key lobbyists, e. g. if we map the data and names. And ideally also the money given to them. Ultimately they are faceless though, because corruption is easily exchangeable. The issue here is systemic though. The US "democracy" no longer exists due to that corruption. It is not rule by the people but rule by bribery.
IANAL but there have been some attempts to argue that forcing operating systems to add any age attestation etc. is compelled speech. Guess the question is which Distro will foot the bill to test this in actual court.
Their website (now offline) also added this page since I posted that comment: https://web.archive.org/web/20260411112604/https://tboteproj... where they claim their website is under "surveillance" because it got a few thousand requests from Google Cloud et al, most of them to a single page. This shows how low their standards are.
These bills all suddenly appeared, as if by magic, in multiple state houses only a very short time after Zuck was on the stand in the Facebook trial early in the year testifying that "the right place to do age verification is in the operating system".
Now, granted, correlation is not always causation. But it sure stinks of something Meta had their lobbyists push just after Zuck's testimony so as to shift the liability risk of handling age appropriate material away from Meta properties and onto operating systems (Microsoft, Apple, Google (Android)).
They retain their value because they _are_ useful for real work and are mostly built for longer lives. Even if new purchases are for luxury reasons used purchases have prices pushed up for working people.
I had not! Cool to see that there's a established theory about linguistic determinism(great term btw!)
I was only speaking from personal experience, I moved from Sweden to Brazil in my early twenties and after a while I began thinking and dreaming in Portuguese. I noticed then that my thought process changed(actually, I noticed it upon moving back to Sweden, as my thoughts and dreams shifted back to my mother's tongue. The shift the way back was much faster since I already spoke Swedish whereas in Brazil I had to learn the language before beginning thinking in it)
Anyway, I noticed then that I would interpret the world differently depending on which language I used for my internal monologue. Like way different. It was a curious experience!
