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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

The government can, and has, taken a vested interest in parenting when parents fail.

Car seats? Seat belts? Curfews? Hospital reporting laws? Child safety standards? Mandatory smoke detectors? Curriculum standards? Mandatory education?

All not necessary if parents just did their jobs, right?

On that note, the US government states in their own papers in the SCOTUS case that parental control filtering is so niche, that it is at the level of complete irrelevancy in fulfilling the government’s interest in preventing children from viewing porn. One SCOTUS judge with children has already said that in her experience, it’s impossibly complex even for a devoted parent.

Tech can’t point to parental controls when they failed miserably in their implementation.

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> All not necessary if parents just did their jobs, right?

most, if not all of those things, are necessary because a parent is unable to make any changes to stop the danger. Good parenting cannot stop a car accident (unless you're claiming that you have perfect driving skills). Ditto with the other examples.

The difference between age verification and those is that verification puts an undue harm onto the entire population, for which they derive zero benefit, just so that a few parents who cannot be bothered to monitor their child could continue their lack of responsibility.

A few parents? According to the US governments own statistics at SCOTUS right now, almost all parents are failing to restrict, and don’t even know how, even if they wanted to.

This also hoists undue harm across a population - children and teenagers. As the SCOTUS case is going forward, Texas is (correctly) pointing out that this is very different than 90s dial up, and the porn is far more intense, violent, graphic, and accessible. Because we’ve already had porn filters, and even the opposition concedes they’ve been uselessly ineffective, therefore…

That’s the argument. It’s a good argument. You don’t have to like the conclusion. However, I have seen firsthand that filtering, and talking to children, absolutely is not, and never will be, effective.

>However, I have seen firsthand that filtering, and talking to children, absolutely is not, and never will be, effective.

Weird, I have seen firsthand that absolutely can be! I guess we're at an impasse.

Do the children in question watch porn, even sometimes?

If so, it was not effective.

And even if it was, according to the US government, >90% of parents can’t pull it off, and they’ve had over 20 years to try (tech companies included). That’s law-changing time.

As one legal analogy put it: Imagine if there was a law mandating public transportation from City A to City B. There’s a bus line, but it’s people 6 feet or taller only. Don’t come into the courtroom defending it by saying crawling is always an option, and some people have been crawling, so therefore the law is upheld.

This is a pathetic incarnation of the "think of the children!" fallacy Americans love so much. You fundamentally cannot stop children from watching porn. It is like arguing for a second prohibition so we can stop kids from accessing alcohol - not only will the plan fail, it will disproportionately harm the legal consumers to the point they're comfortable breaking the law. Age authentication doesn't work, and it's going to train kids to access illegal pornography if they want their fix.

Parents can't stop it any more than they can stop kids from watching violent movies or renouncing their faith. Quit arguing with this slippery-slope logic, your comment history reads like Pagliacci's personal diary.

>All not necessary if parents just did their jobs, right?

No... Parent's can't reasonably mitigate what a car seat or seat belt mitigates.

Besides that, the benefits vs. harms needs to be weighed before you shove your parenting responsibilities off to the government. Age verification laws have the potential to do a lot of harm to a lot of people. Seat belt laws do not do a lot of harm to a lot of people.

I agree with your comment but disagree with the framing that these are necessary because parents “fail”.

The safety mechanisms you point to are not a result of parents failing, it’s a result of a common agreement that society as a whole benefits from certain guardrails. Seatbelts were very controversial! But after you realize that a seatbelt is a small inconvenience that can prevent you or your children from being violently ejected from the vehicle and splatting on the pavement in the event of a car crash, we agreed as a society that the public health good outweighed the slight inconvenience of wearing a seatbelt. Nothing to do with the failings of parents. Parents already feel like failures most of the time already as it is.

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