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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

The escape hatch is the parent opening the account in their own name.

Companies don't have a choice here: Someone under 18 can not enter into a contract, there's nothing really they can do.

Hmm, in Germany children and teens can still enter contracts, as long as they are able to pay it with their monthly pocket money. Every single thing you buy here in a supermarket is also an implicit contract (Kaufvertrag).

So, you could theoretically rent servers and buy ad space on Adsense as long your pocket money covers it. On the other hand: this is a liability for Google and $provider -- as most of them are post-pay. If a teen ever decides to spawn an A1000 instance with 36 cores and cannot pay, the contract is void and Google has no entitlement for compensation.

Pre-paid stuff like a small instance on vultr.com should work fine, though.

Postpaid was my favorite when I was a poor 16 year old.

I couldn't believe you can rent 12 core servers for 3 months and not pay for it!

Yes, I know it was illegal lol

How would the counter party know how much pocket money any given child has?

I believe to remember that the contract is valid if a minor of that age typically has that amount of money available and can understand the consequences of the contract. So the business owner does not need to know how much money the particulur kid gets. If the particular kid gets exceptionally small pocket money the contract is valid and the parents are responsible for its legal implications.

Of course what is typical for a certain age might end up for interpretation by the courts in the worst case (and occasionally it does).

How much money does, for example, a fifteen year old typically have?

Is pocket money universal? I thought it was somewhat outdated as a concept, but it could just be the archaic term.

I have not heard that it would be outdated as a concept. What would be the replacement? To my understanding it is generally recommended the give minors some money. And parents should not interfere much even if they disagree how it's spent.

What the term would be in English speaking countries I have no idea if pocket money sounds archaic. The translation sounds good to me not being a native speaker.

The sum might depend a lot on the country. I have no contacts to 16 year olds so I can't tell.

https://www.wiado.de/taschengeldparagraph-was-ist-das/ has a table. It doesn't look completely unreasonable for Germany. Please note that this is not a law, so if a case goes the court the judge might come to slightly different figures.

They have a choice. They could ban him until he's 18 or 5 years lapse whichever is longer. It's not black and white and doesn't need to be for life. I know the google guy who informed him he was banned for life has no power over that though. This is a straight up decision from much higher up than his pay grade. So he informed the person and locked it. It's all he could really do. I hope the internet rage-brigade doesn't do anything bad to him.

> It's all he could really do.

Is it really? At the very least he can refuse to lock/resolve the question and quit. Perhaps not something to reasonably expect for a single customer. Perhaps he really needs that job to survive. But the notion that you are not responsible for your companies bad behavior that you are part of just because you don't make the decisions is absurd.

There is plenty they can do and that they're already doing. The inability to enter contracts with someone doesn't mean they need to get banned for life from the service.

The unreasonableness here is that since the party couldn't enter into a contract they are precluded for life from doing so in the future.

But things can be done without contracts. You can't hold a child accountable to pay a bill--but children certainly can buy things. You simply make things with children entirely prepay or time-of-transaction pay (you hand the clerk the $, you get the item.)

They can, but they can also renege on most of them.

Not sure if you can do that after you turn 18 though.

Do you know for sure it is absolutely impossible? I know at least 3 countries where you can get a permission from your parents being 16, 14, or even 12.

I know that, because I was 16 when we did the procedure to allow me be adult (have all the rights of being 21, except vote and consume alcohol)

The US is pretty strict about it, legally speaking.

If I recall correctly, the reason I couldn't get a debit card for my bank account as a 14/15 year old without giving a guardian access to my account is that issuing a debit card required signing a contract and I legally couldn't do that.

Minors do sign things, they just have no legal validity for the most part (I think employment docs for kids over 14/16 might be an exception, but a lot of states regulate that and mandate an adult's consent as well).

> Companies don't have a choice here: Someone under 18 can not enter into a contract, there's nothing really they can do.

If this were the case they someone under eighteen would not be able to buy anything in a shop. That is a contract.

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