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Comment by ta1243 | Hacker News Reader

They could have insisted websites include something like a TXT record saying they are "for over 18s only". Or even come up with a standard saying "this website is suitable for under 18s" under a dns record.

Then the bill payer can enable or disable access for three categories

* Under 18s

* Over 18s

* Unknown

as they are the bill payer and entering into a credit agreement requires you to be over 18. If you wanted belt and braces the phone companies doing PAYG could set it to disabled unless you authenticate your age to avoid the "buy simcard for cash" loophole.

ISPs could choose to implement finer grained controls in their routers. The majority of the big ISPs would likely block the "over 18" category by default.

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Rather than DNS consider an existing solution that just lacks laws to require server operators to add it and web clients to look for it. That is RTA headers. [1] Adding a header is trivial and clients looking for it is an afternoon of coding from an intern. As a bonus there is no privacy leaks unlike third party adult verification sites. The onus would be on the parents to enable it. Teens will always get around it given they watch porn and pirated movies together from within G and PG rated video games and that will always be a thing but it could help small children.

[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single

> include something like a TXT record

The people writing these laws don't know about DNS.

This isn't really relevant because what is considered "suitable for under 18s" varies wildly per country. Some countries ban rainbow flags, others will happily sell alcohol to 16-year-olds. Plus, 99.99% of websites don't care about this and will be blocked by default if you block the "unknown" category. Grandma isn't going to call their ISP and ask to unblock pornography because the American knitting forum she's on doesn't know how to add TXT records.

Technical solutions don't solve political problems.

> The majority of the big ISPs would likely block the "over 18" category by default.

Existing UK legislation already requires them to do that.

The UK has a standard list of sites that need to be flagged "over 18 only in the uk", that's the list of sites that will need to be added to a list which ISPs can block by default.

Putting the onus on the ISPs operating in the UK rather than the sites operating globally is much easier to implement than trying to enforce your laws on foreign companies.

That's if you want the outcome to block a certain list of sites by default.

As you say in reality we already have that. The question thus is what's the real point of the move, because it's not to stop 15 year olds jacking off.

> as they are the bill payer and entering into a credit agreement requires you to be over 18. If you wanted belt and braces the phone companies doing PAYG could set it to disabled unless you authenticate your age to avoid the "buy simcard for cash" loophole.

This is already the case in UK, has been for years. The bill payer needs to prove age with an ID to lift IP level blocks from some default age blocklist.

It doesn't work well because obviously a lot of internet is shared amongst a household, and the blocklist is too broad to make it annoying enough that any adults will remove it. Then of course you can always just use a VPN same as with the current situation.

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