> You realize that a lot of parents support this sort of thing because they are not technically sophisticated enough to control it themselves?
We can make it so that it's as easy as changing the settings on their child's phone and then setting a password to lock that setting. The technical barrier isn't high.
> Or they simply think that it has no place in polite society?
That doesn't justify giving the government the tools to crush free speech on the Internet, which threatens the very existence of polite society. The current wave of authoritarianism around the world is a direct consequence of undemocratic governance systems on the Internet. In hindsight, it was kind of our fault. Failing to foresee its civilization-scale impact, we did not design the Internet with democratic principles in mind. This eventually resulted in large social media and cloud services platforms with enough users to sway elections, that operate under opaque centralized moderation and curation mechanisms. This became a real problem when smartphones were invented and most of human communication suddenly got moved online: freedom of speech has been de facto damaged for almost two decades now.
But it's a problem that can reverse itself, if we can figure out a way to neutralize the Internet's implicit incentives that encourage the centralization of compute and storage (which is equivalent to the centralization of power when most communication occurs online). And as you might guess, such solutions require a free enough Internet to create and deploy. That's why we must push back against these Internet control laws in the meantime, otherwise governments will simply use these legal tools to suppress attempts to decentralize the Internet, and we'd end up with authoritarian regimes all around the world.
We can make it so that it's as easy as changing the settings on their child's phone and then setting a password to lock that setting. The technical barrier isn't high.
> Or they simply think that it has no place in polite society?
That doesn't justify giving the government the tools to crush free speech on the Internet, which threatens the very existence of polite society. The current wave of authoritarianism around the world is a direct consequence of undemocratic governance systems on the Internet. In hindsight, it was kind of our fault. Failing to foresee its civilization-scale impact, we did not design the Internet with democratic principles in mind. This eventually resulted in large social media and cloud services platforms with enough users to sway elections, that operate under opaque centralized moderation and curation mechanisms. This became a real problem when smartphones were invented and most of human communication suddenly got moved online: freedom of speech has been de facto damaged for almost two decades now.
But it's a problem that can reverse itself, if we can figure out a way to neutralize the Internet's implicit incentives that encourage the centralization of compute and storage (which is equivalent to the centralization of power when most communication occurs online). And as you might guess, such solutions require a free enough Internet to create and deploy. That's why we must push back against these Internet control laws in the meantime, otherwise governments will simply use these legal tools to suppress attempts to decentralize the Internet, and we'd end up with authoritarian regimes all around the world.