zlacker

>>azalem+(OP)
One thing I’ve realised over the past few weeks is that some parents must be delighted to have the government control the web for them.

When the parent does the enforcement themselves then they can be put under direct pressure by their children to drop the ban. When the government does it then the parent can say, honestly, sorry, there’s nothing they can do about it: It’s out of their hands. The child only has access to tier 1 support [parent] and the support agent’s only response is “sorry, corporate policy [law] requires AV for certain sites, there’s nothing I can do. Is there anything else I can help you with today?…”

I don’t say this to make the laws easier to swallow but the social economics of it make it more understandable why this law might be so popular with anyone already overloaded with angry teenagers.

Next up: the Bedtime Is At Nine PM Act 2026, Tuck Your Shirt In Act 2027, and No We Have One At Home Already Act 2028.

>>gorgoi+Xa
And then the child talks to their friends, some of whom already have free VPNs, and works around it and said parent goes around oblivious to the fact that their child has access to whatever they want.

My son figured out free VPNs when he was 8-9. This is only stopping adults.

>>vidarh+sd
Exactly what I was going to say, though I don't think this will stop adults either. If somebody wants porn without asking Big Brother for permission, they're going to search for the answer for how to do that, and find it immediately.

In the era of LLMs this is even more true. Every single chatbot I tried (DeepSeek, Grok, Claude, ChatGPT) except ChatGPT immediately gave numerous and detailed instructions on how to easily bypass the bans. I'm sure one could trivially push ChatGPT outside its love for big brother as well, if they cared to do so.

It's not clear to me who exactly such bans are effective against, and to what end. Obviously the government gains an immense amount of power so they're going to love it, regardless of its efficacy.