If something like this was in widespread use it would have much more impact since countries would see whole swathes of the internet immediately go dark when they make stupid laws.
This is a dangerous precedent though that IMO everyone should fight against.
It's how we get the balkanization of the internet, and the death of it as a global network.
TBH we also shouldn't put the onus on blocking "unsafe" countries on the website owners, nor an intermediary like CloudFlare. If a nation wants to block certain content, let the nation deal with it by getting their own ISPs to block and make sure the citizen's anger gets correctly placed on their government and not the site operators.
I don’t really understand comments like these. Even if you’re exactly right about how it should work, how would you make this happen in the world we live in? Neither the tech community nor ISPs nor cloud companies decide these things. Just because a matter affects us doesn’t mean we have much of a voice in it especially if it’s legal.
Laws about tech are decided by (idiot) politicians/parties/governments and the consequences are enforced by massive fines, imprisonment, etc. by law enforcement and selective (and often politically motivated) prosecution. In some of the worst places the consequences could include death.
Afghanistan just lost access to the internet almost entirely. China and North Korea are famous for their firewalls. Much of Asia has internet blackouts whenever there are large scale protests. The western world’s government has more legal jurisdiction/economic influence on the companies that run these things and are increasingly leveraging that for their desired censorship.
If the answer to this is democratic influence, the populations of many countries don’t really have that, the majorities in countries that do have it certainly doesn’t know or care about these things and wouldn’t vote for the pro-censorship politicians in the first place if they’d then vote to cut off their nation’s access to uncensored internet while preserving the uncensored variants, and even if the majority ever did care to get the system to work in this way there’s a global trend away from having their opinions on such things matter anyway.
Is nobody thinking about what this actually means? Do you really want the entire internet to require ID validation every time you use it? Do you want your government deciding if your content is okay to view, or okay to post? Do you welcome the level of tracking of privacy violations that inherently come with this much government intervention?
It seems people on HN have a sudden wake up call whenever these rules get too close to reality, like when access to websites gets cut off or ID verification is added to websites that they use. My theory is that they’re imagining a world where only the services they dislike get regulated: The TikToks and Facebooks of the internet. None of these people calling for extensive regulation are thinking that sites they use would ever end up on the regulated sites list, but if you enjoy any site with user submitted content (Hacker News included) then you’re calling for additional regulation and tracking of yourself when you demand these things.
Sites with user generated content already have to have some level of moderation to remove copyrighted or illegal materials (e.g. child porn). So it's not a big difference to say if you want to have user generated content and not be considered an adult site, you need to take down any submitted adult content (or only allow it in adult verified areas or whatever). If HN doesn't allow people to post their amateur smut stories, it could then be unaffected.
These aren't equivalent though. I can flash my ID to someone to buy cigarettes at my gas station and reasonably believe that no third party is storing my ID. The clerk looks at it (or scans it? I have actually never purchased anything requiring an ID before), and I go about my merry way.
If I go online to consume adult content, I definitely do not want my identity to be associated with my proclivities, and I certainly don't trust any third party to handle my ID with the sensitivity it ought to have.