Well Hexbear and Lemmy were nice while the lasted. I don’t think either have the interest or people outside the long arm of American law to run as pirate services ignoring such laws in the long-run and trying to flaunt them on an ad-hoc basis will just lead to a sudden and dramatic total shut-down when someone affiliated gets served or raided. A lot of the great parts of the internet are going to straight up die because of this but at least the perfect, all-seeing panopticon police state over the internet and real life will finally be realized. Unfortunately the real life part is really coming into fruition with Flock, AI analysis of other spying data, etc so even touching grass is not safe from the panopticon police state.
Tech companies due to AI destroying ability to get ad dollars (because who is human who is bot advertisers ask and pay fractions of the previous pennies now) and the scrapers driving up costs for everyone hosting anything are fully onboard with it when previously they were the only interests that matter stopping it. Also will alleviate a lot of the moderation burden as right now they have to manually intervene and repeatedly crush accounts from pro-Palestinian and anti-empire sources but once they can tie names to things? They just ban you once and pass your info on to the feds for a not so friendly conversation. We are in such shit.
This title may be cited as the ‘‘Shielding Children’s Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net Act’’ or the ‘‘SCREEN Act’’
They really love their acronyms
Using “protect the children” as a justification for infringing on people’s rights to privacy
Very believable when many of the undewriters of this legislation are in the Epstein files. They really care about the kids. Yeah.
They’ve been trying to pull some form of this since the 90s. It has been resoundingly rejected every time, but this time they’ve got big tech on their side, and they’ve got the technical means in place to pull it off now.
AI created the perfect storm. Big tech previously profited somewhat from people being more comfortable doing certain things online in private anonymity. But now the ad impressions are worthless because of AI bots, the scrapers are banging down the doors of everything and driving up hosting costs, and the only way other than murdering the AI industry to stop this is forced human identification so yes I fear we are quite screwed.
Age checks to get online? Like a paid contract with an ISP to get a connection in the first place?
I already pay for internet access and need to be aged 18 or above for it.
They want to tie specific devices to specific people.
