All this ostensibly to keep teenage boys from watching Pornhub (when parental controls already exist).
The real reason, of course, is to force people to connect strong real-life identifiers to online activity. Mobile first, then Windows. Then Linux is too weak to oppose on its own, and will adapt or die.
> The real reason, of course, is to force people to connect strong real-life identifiers to online activity.
This is worse than that, this paves a way for corporations to shove anti-user crap (adware, spyware, "sideloading" restrictions etc) to devices that are mandatory for you.. and in a way you can't fight it, because now government is protecting that crap without even realizing it.
It's one thing that I can't install a custom OS on my credit card.. but it's a different thing when that device is actively connected to the network, sending my data to some US company, prevents me from removing bloatware / installing my own software.. and on top of that displays ads.
That's a completely unhelpful, overly simplistic straw man argument.
We restrict certain activities and places in the real world from certain people all the time. For example, not allowing people under 18 or 21 (depending on your country) into casinos. What we have now is essentially unrestricted access to pretty much anything and a fair assessment is that there is societal harm from that. We're creating gambling addicts (which is arguably the most harmful form of addiction), allowing predators to interact with children,, manipulating children through advertising and algorithms, flaming harmful behaviors like eating disorders, allowing mass cyberbullying and so on.
So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed. The only question from here is what to d we do about it. You can say "nothing" but that's a losing argument.
I personally believe that the easiest thign to attack is advertising to minors. This will take away the financial incentive for these platforms to create addictive behaivors in minors. And most of these tech platforms have already built the infrastructure to do this. You don't allow advertisers to target an audience based on (actual or inferred) ages under 18. You extend that to proxies for age, like an interest in Minecraft. And you make advertising to children illegal.
Arguably, I'd go further and restrict certain features for minors, such as comments on Youtube and an algorithmic feed.
At the moment nobody is solving anything because it's simply a fight to move liability to someone else. Meta wants hardware vendors to be responsible because, guess what?, they have no hardware platform. Apple and Google likely want app to have to deal with it for the complete opposite reason.
I believe we should shift that liability to advertising.
What's simplistic and unhelpful is falling for the narrative that infinite scroll, boobies, and algorithmic feeds are somehow more harmful than ubiquitous government surveillance of the most powerful communication tool on earth. The Internet, more or less, has been around 30+ years and the Something awful and 4chan generations are now in charge. We're not much worse off. The Internet is actually way tamer these days than it used to be.
We can all agree that yeah sure this social media stuff isn't great, but that's the whole point of freedom. Fast food isn't great either but lawmakers aren't pushing for a junk food attestation framework to make sure you don't consume it more than twice a week. In other words, your best interest is not interesting to them at all. They are happy that you think it is somehow self evident that we should subject ourselves to undue surveillance through!
So, wonder why they're pushing for this so hard. I'll take the brainrot if it means criticism and ideas can spread without permanently being associated with a trackable, unchanging identity.
"Boobies" really understates what is available virtually unrestricted on Pornhub and similar sites. If "boobies" were the extent of it, far fewer people would be worried about it.
On restricting, I really think that's the responsibility of parents. I think the problem here is that Android and iOS don't empower their users (parents) to implement proper parental controls. I imagine apps don't get the access and maybe the parental controls implemented by the OS don't suffice? Maybe because Android and iOS benefit from these kinds of legislation that cement their duopoly.
I agree that none of the current user platforms, i.e. Android, iOS, nor desktop, have adequate parental controls that are easy to use. Parental controls are important but that's not enough. We expect parents to not buy liquor for their kids, and make reasonable efforts to prevent their kids from obtaining it. But we also expect liquor stores to not sell liquor to kids. We should likewise expect that internet content platforms do not deliver inappropriate content to kids.
Pornhub is incredibly restrictive about what can be uploaded and about identifying who is uploading the videos and is now also demanding proof of consent from the performers (presumably to avoid revenge porn).
If one of the most compliant actors is already "virtually unrestricted" then you just want to censor things you don't like and the censorship of porn is just a pretense for the things you actually want to censor.
Based upon this sentiment, it's already too late as 2Girls1Cup already existed and has done it's damage to the current generation who are obviously deviants!
How can we even trust these lawmakers when Blue Waffles, Tub Girl and Goatsee already existed??!
Unless it hasn't. And while it's grosser than finding a copy of Readers Wives in the park, the "think of the children" angle is overhyped.
Don't know about boobies, but I would guess META/other infinite scroll products are this generation's cigarettes in terms of long term harm and we do a severe disservice to all young people that are exposed to this product. Moreover, asking parents to intervene is obviously not going to work because they, themselves, have been partially ruined by it and lack the critical thinking required to intervene and the prowess to execute. Same reason why we needed government to intervene for cigarettes.
I am not endorsing removing all anonymity from being online, but continuing the status quo with social media is a non starter for humanity. So tell me how we can help kids not get ruined by the internet without a mechanism specifically identifying that they're online in the first place?
Then the solution could be just like the solution to tobacco addiction: tax social media companies HARD, tax all advertising on social media 10x, 20x, or ban advertising on/for social media outright, ban advertising of kids products, ban showing use of social media in movies not rated 18, ... the problem will vanish just like cigarettes.
But no, that's not what governments are doing. They want control and surveillance.
This is the most sensible solution to this problem I have read on HN in the 2 years I've been here. Think of the positive effects taxation would have: no whack-a-mole for every loophole the industry will find. No single fines after costly court battles that are basically pocket change for Zuckerberg et al. Adherence to polluter-pays-priciple. Make it so that if they stop advertising, the tax expires. Use the tax money for better infrastructue. Make the tax progressive - the more ads, the higher the tax.
Added benefit: even adults will be less exposed to addictive material.
Do you know what happen when advertising is banned? It would go underground -- product placement, contest, merchandises, and so on. Advertising existed as soon as commerce became a thing, probably thousand years ago. It can't be banned. I wouldn't vote for that.
Regulation, on the other hand, is fine. How? I don't know.
It'd be tough to phrase it right. Imagine that The Ones Who Ban Things decide to write something interpretable as essentially "nobody is allowed to inform others about things". The process of distilling any ad banning law into applicable testing of that law would be pretty scary to me
Taxing may be a good way to restore balance. Banning means goodbye online news, Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Translate, ad-supported games, etc. -- basically everything we've become accustomed to having for free will want a monthly subscription.
It's going to take a lot more evidence to get me anywhere near consideration that this is a trade worth making. Again, we know that fast food can be attributed to hundreds of thousands of early deaths per anum, but we regulate that not at all. In fact it's sadly a staple of the average kids diet.
Passing laws out of fear is not how any competent legislature should operate.
> continuing the status quo with social media is a non starter for humanity. So tell me how we can help kids not get ruined by the internet without a mechanism specifically identifying that they're online
What if I told you it's very simple? We work at banning the harmful dynamics of corporate social media for everyone [0], rather than beating around the bush about kids. In fact, trying to avoid this is exactly why Faceboot et al are lobbying for this age verification crap in the first place - to escape the one tiny avenue of liability that has managed to exist, so they can keep kicking the can down the road.
Given how wholly top-down these proposals all are, frankly they would be better off being referred to as "give control of what your kids can see to the judgement of corporate attorneys.
[0] antitrust enforcement would go a long way here. Faceboot operates on online hosting service, so they should be prohibited from anticompetitively tying the client software used to access it (which necessarily includes "the algorithm").
Algorithmic scroll is factually more harmful, regardless of the amount of harm as long as it's non-zero, because it does affect people. Surveillance on its own doesn't. It just doesn't, everything that you can think of in response is not solely or even significantly caused by surveillance.
Instead, limiting surveillance (which in this case is only linked to the issue at hand with what's explicitly a conspiracy theory, so the link is quite tenuous) was originally meant to limit the government's powers as a form of control over the government. Control over the government is just a part of the Enlightenment project of societies being able to shape their destinies equitably, which includes shaping political arrangements.
Americans have completely lost the ability to shape their political system (when was the last constitutional amendment passed again?), so instead the discourse turned to fetishising particular tools that might help, but were never the point of having freedom. This is a fallacy.
There are straightforward ways to have age verification without descending into a dictatorship. To use an analogy, most European countries have mandatory IDs, some even have digital IDs; many of those counties are freer than the US.
Freedom is being able to stop kids from accessing pornhub without fearing a dictatorship because you can just prevent the dictatorship through a million other means. Freedom is not paralysing the political system as technology and progress (and multi-billion dollar megacorporations) march on.
Otherwise societies just get superficial "freedoms" (like using slurs in public spaces because "free speech") while their governments, say, run a paramilitary murdering political opponents on the street.
> We restrict certain activities and places in the real world from certain people all the time. For example, not allowing people under 18 or 21 (depending on your country) into casinos.
These are not equivalent. Restricting access to a casino just requires showing an ID to a person. A few seconds later and that person has completely forgotten everything about you. They will not keep a record of your home address, etc. Perfectly privacy preserving. You have no such guarantee when you upload government IDs to a server.
I don't think anyone here minds restricting access, but that doesn't require completely destroying ownership rights over our own devices nor internet and device privacy.
All that really needs to be done is for servers to publish what type of content they show from a parental perspective in a machine-readable format and for devices to have parental controls that only allow access to servers that publish such info and which content is allowed by the parental settings.
This should be even more effective than solutions requiring uploading IDs since there's still going to be servers out there in other jurisdictions that simply don't care for such things.
> You have no such guarantee when you upload government IDs to a server.
The problem is that so many people here look at this purely from a USA perspective.
An age check in many European requires no uploading of any ID. It’s an API call toward an ID service, it will tell you which data the service gets access to, and there’s strict regulations and liability around data retention.
I’m not concerned about the government. If they become authoritarian enough to worry, they will impose far tighter surveillance anyway. What we have now is the naive idea that just by not doing ID check, government surveillance is a solved problem in the free democratic world. It’s not. Avoiding ID checks just makes the problem worse because it makes the regular person complacent. The surveillance is implicit and hidden. If we understand that it’s nearly impossible for a non-tech person to avoid being tracked by corporations and governments, then we start working on the things that really help: super tight regulations about what can and can’t be tracked. Requiring audits of large corporations. Solutions that give corporations access to only the data they absolutely need and nothing else (the lack of such things is how we end up by uploading whole ID documents)
> The surveillance is implicit and hidden. If we understand that it’s nearly impossible for a non-tech person to avoid being tracked by corporations and governments, then we start working on the things that really help: super tight regulations about what can and can’t be tracked.
We can't get perfect privacy so we should normalize not having any? Leave it to the government we're distrusting to handle our privacy?
> If they become authoritarian enough to worry, they will impose far tighter surveillance anyway.
What is this logic? Let's not worry about creeping there because if they want it they'll force it? That's not how it works. Getting to a surveillance state needs acceptance. To get that, rather than dropping people in boiling water, you slowly heat the pot, which is what this is.
Just a few decades years ago, everyone's names and phones in the US were freely available to anyone with a phone book. Communications were done in the clear, either via letters (hardly tamper-proof), or via phone (that anyone with access could tap).
Did every American live in a "surveillance state" back then?
Bad analogy. A phone book tells you nothing about who you are talking to or what you are talking about over the phone. Most free countries don't let law enforcement read letters without a warrant. And even in authoritarian states the police couldn't wiretap everyone or read every letter. The volume was simply too massive for any manual operation.
Digitalization and now AI technology changes this drastically because it makes it drastically cheaper to record and flag human communications.
Back then there was only the possibility of listening-in on particulars, and even then people did worry. They weren't fine with that. That's why there's wiretapping laws enacted in the 80s.
Today, and as things continue to progress with speech-recognition, LLMs, video recognition, etc. surveillance can be automated. It's looking conceivable to be able to process all communication population-wide in real-time. That would have been unimaginable back then.
Now, texts and calls today are only a small role of phones. For many people, it's their primary general computing device. It's how they interact with the world. It contains their entire digital life.
Couldn't look at your photo reels and videos, and diary, and every purchase you've ever made, every opinion you've ever said on a public space, every community you've ever interacted with, every location you've ever been in down to the room, from wiretapping a phone in the 80s.
> Some things are exceptionally hard to track now (like e2ee messages) that were trivial to track back then.
Can be easier than back then if stuff like chat-control comes to pass, because now the message can be obtained, processed and stored indefinitely in an automated fashion for everybody at once. E2EE becomes security theater for the most part.
You just said it yourself: the perceived danger of overreach was averted through new laws and control over what the government is doing.
If citizens still have a capacity to restrict the government via (enforced) laws, it doesn't matter much that the communications are in the clear. You can layer something on top just to be sure, but the foundation is laws and a functioning political system.
If there's no functioning political system, the government will just do whatever, like buying the same data they ostensibly can't collect from commercial providers (who weren't restricted from collecting it because there's no US GDPR).
If a country has a functioning political system, it can just do things like ban gun ownership, introduce mandatory IDs, publish everyone's yearly income, or criminalise calling other people slurs in public and not become an uncontrollable dictatorship. If it doesn't, corruption and democratic backsliding will happen regardless. Hyper-focusing on a few tools and superficial traits of a particular system in a particular moment is myopic.
> You just said it yourself: the perceived danger of overreach was averted through new laws and control over what the government is doing. If citizens still have a capacity to restrict the government via (enforced) laws
Restricting the government via laws... The government implements the laws. Trying to restrict the government via laws is mostly just asking "pretty-please don't screw us over." They're not going to make a difference to a corrupt government. Government corruption will become more enticing too because of the added concentration of power it would have. How have laws been working for restricting Trump? He's shown how easily they can be sidestepped and manipulated.
Also, back then implementing end-to-end encryption of all calls wasn't feasible. That would have been the preferred option. It's feasible now. We have it. Why rely on something as fallible as government-restricting laws when we have better options?
It's better for power to be decentralized, as it is with every device owner having sole access to their own devices. As well as being able to communicate anonymously, which is huge for matters of free-speech and democracy.
Indeed, Trump is a great example of democratic backsliding completely unfettered by "freedoms" often mistaken for the actual freedom. The way forward is being able to change things or regaining this ability if it's lost, not trying to carve out some bit that's not under the government's control yet. That's just a form of escapism.
There is a malaise permeating modern culture, where social action does not enter the mind at all, possibly because it does not provide instant results. Collective action and organising local communities has always been the solution to social ills. It's why I'm looking forward to the progressives in US, they seem to be organising themselves quite well.
do parents not control routers and cell plans? I feel like it would be easy to look here for header based solutions. They probably exist tbh. Then just ban your kid from VPNs.
> So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed.
The market failure to provide an adequate solution wasn't natural. It was engineered by the tech companies and you are playing right into their hands. There is still a way to fix this from the root with software antitrust: force hardware vendors to ship their devices without an operating system.
Here's a more detailed explanation in a past comment about how the problem came to be in the first place, and why software antitrust can solve it:
> I personally believe that the easiest thign to attack is advertising to minors.
Well then, let's regulate this instead? Advertising companies already make a pretty good guess about a person's age. It doesn't require 3rd parties and age verification.
But we won't — this isn't why identity checks are getting lobbied.
> I believe we should shift that liability to advertising.
I am confused. Are you saying that advertising companies should handle these identity checks? So let's just hand out a unique identifier to the companies who have monetary interest in this? Surely this will end well.
> So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed.
Absolute bullshit. This "unfettered access" is the whole reason why I am who I am today, why I am here. Not only did it not fail, it's in fact so successful it threatens the powers that be, and that's the real reason why they want to ban it.
> I personally believe that the easiest thign to attack is advertising to minors.
Now this I agree with. I would be even more radical. It's not just advertising "to minors", all advertising needs to get banned straight up. Advertising is mind rape. Ban it and all the problems with the web will be fixed literally overnight, including the problems "mandated hardware attestation" aims to solve. There is no need whatsoever for this attestation nonsense.
What you're saying is correct - but it's used to push a much more comprehensive lockdown of devices that has absolutely nothing to do with protection of minors.
It's as if the government first let businesses install slot machines at every street corner, then suddenly went "I'm shocked, shocked! that we have a massive epidemic of gambling addiction here, we have to mandate anti-gambling shock collars for everyone to tackle this urgent problem! There is no alternative!"
This is the slippery slope fallacy and people in tech seem to love this argument. And you can argue in whichever direction you want with it.
For example, "unfettered Internet access is just a series of tubes (shout out to Ted Stevens for that one) for pedophiles to rape your children." So now what? Is it your hyperbole against mine?
The problem is that people are operating under a myth that they have anonymity. You don't. You're one subpoena away from being unmasked online and individuals can do it (eg [1]). When governments do it, they can do it in secret. National Security Letters, pen registers, FISA warrants, etc.
So the idea that "age verification is the first step to a more comprehensive" is flawed in both logical construction (being a fallacy) and that ship has already sailed.
But in this case, the slipping just happened. This thread is about how an app that will be required for using a vast fraction of all websites will require hardware attestation and likely only run on closed, non-rooted mobile OSes. That's not a hypothetical scenario, it's literally what this thread is about.
>> "We're creating gambling addicts (which is arguably the most harmful form of addiction)"
---
I will need a source, because "arguably" is a very broad umbrella.
"Arguably" heroin addiction is the most harmful addiction because heroin is the most addictive substance, clouds judgement and drives the addict to all manners of sociopathic behaviour (not only theft or prostitition)
One big difference is that heroin is mostly illegal or, if not outright illegal, decriminalized for personal use. Gambling is legal in most places, can be advertised quite freely and restrictions can be easily circumvented with crypto. Crypto casinos have little to no age verification and typically operate extrajudicially (from the victim). Gambling addiction has a high outcome of suicide and tends to leave financial ruin affecting not just that person but their entire family.
Heroin addiction was largely created by the criminialization of cannabis (the first so-called War on Drugs under Nixon) as a tool to persecute black people and war protesters and the overprescription of opioids (eg the Sacklers/Purdue).
That last sentence is neither here not there. I don't think gambling is good; I would have it gone from the internet and reserved to casinos. There is no MORAL justification to push for government control so gambling online can be legal.
Fentanyl is another opioid, like heroin; it also has a very high addictive potential. But, if I am not mistaken, the real problem with fentanyl is that dealers contaminate other drugs with fentanyl, which becomes lethal when not done correctly (and dealers aren't very responsible)
I don't understand where the all the EU anti-trust and anti-corruption regulators are here. _Governments_ enforcing that you have a Google or Apple account to participate in society is transparently absurd.
This isn't only a digital sovereignty issue, it's also an anti-competition issue.
This is the correct intuition. The problem can be solved with antitrust by forcing hardware vendors to ship their devices without an operating system. Then the market will deliver the parenting solutions that don't require mass surveillance. We're currently being blocked from doing so by anti-competitive measures.
The reality of the matter is that it is virtually impossible for Europe to even begin to displace Apple or Google devices, and especially not operating systems and all the ecosystem that goes along with it.
The EU politicians are just publicly paying lip-service to "digital sovereignty" while they quietly hope this all just blows over when Trump is gone in 2 years.
> it is virtually impossible for Europe to even begin to displace Apple or Google devices
It's hard for sure but they are not even trying, the non-duopoly alternatives are run by hobbyists in their free time and just get shit on by EU bureaucrats
Agreed, I doubt that a mega-behemoth like Google or Microsoft could emerge in Europe. Especially not on a compressed timescale.
But if they really wanted digital verification without the surveillance capitalism built in, I’m sure there are plenty of companies that could do it. Especially if it was around an open source framework.
Anti-corruption regulators are paid to look away. If they start investigating corruption like e.g. Ukraine does, then the EU countries will be perceived as corrupt. The goal of these institutions is to keep things under the rug so to speak.
That's why you barely see anything being done and yet everyone can see how corrupt things are.
My understanding is that you are not forced to use this. Sites in the EU that will be required to verify user age will be free to use any method they wish as long as they can show it is as effective as the app and it does not violate privacy laws.
Most analysts expect sites will offer multiple ways, for a variety of reasons.
Eventually when the full EU Digital Identity Wallet is available age checks can be done using that and the age-only app will go away. For the full wallet the rules explicitly require platforms to have fallback mechanisms for users who are not using the digital wallet.
And how, exactly, will one acquire this "full EU Digital Identity Wallet"? Will I be able to compile it from source and run it on a computing device of my own choosing?
There is no "effective" method without hardware remote attestation. If I control the system, I can just spoof whatever "verification" it is you're asking.
The whole point of hardware attestation is to put a cryptographic key in the computer that the users can't ever get at, then use that key to prove the computer booted a corporate owned operating system that's 100% aligned with government and capitalist surveillance and other cyberpunk dystopia nonsense.
Install a custom system that you control and they will say you have "tampered" with your device, and that transgression will get you ostracized from digital society.
This is what will happen, and if we let it happen might as well close down this site because everything the word hacker ever stood for will have been destroyed.
You can of course create an independent attestation database at any time and mandate its use - verifying that the custom OS you use fits minimum security requirements for digital ID use.
We use that approach in several other industries.
But.... that requires work beyond just complaining.
> You can of course create an independent attestation database at any time
Ah yes. They're totally going to trust my self-signed certificates. They're totally not going to restrict their trust set to the corporate owned and surveillance friendly Google and Apple devices.
Come on now.
> minimum security requirements for digital ID use
Also known as "the user has no control over the device".
Because users who have control can simply spoof this silly "digital ID" and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
> We use that approach in several other industries.
Your industries include the user of the device in their threat models. They want the device secured against the user. Absolutely unacceptable.
> Ah yes. They're totally going to trust my self-signed certificates. They're totally not going to restrict their trust set to the corporate owned and surveillance friendly Google and Apple devices.
That sounds mostly like copium just to motivate your complete inaction.
Again - independent, EU based, attestation database is completely possible to make and we're using similar approval processes across multiple industries to certify hardware - locally, here in EU.
But yea, if you think you'll be able to print passport at home and then go travel and demand that government recognizes that as an ID document, you're a bit optimistic.
> Why not tell us more about the requirements for hardware certification?
Err, it's actually pretty simple: the token/certificate representing your ID (or credit card, or anything really) cannot be exfiltrated by userspace or installed kernel space apps or intercepted on the way to TPM when issued. And it cannot be duplicated.
It's the same set of requirements that are put on credit card smart chips and biometric chips in EU IDs and Passports (which are essentially also TPMs).
But sure, it's a all an evil conspiracy against general purpose computing. And they're all out to get ya. Now smash that downvote for a vote against the evil establishment.
> cannot be exfiltrated by userspace or installed kernel space apps or intercepted on the way to TPM
So it must be secure against the user, as expected.
Preventing the user from "tampering" with the token means carving out a section of the machine and putting it out of his reach. You just created a government embassy on the user's machine. There's no telling what it will be abused for, and there's no escape.
> But sure, it's a all an evil conspiracy against general purpose computing.
You just advocated for putting an inescapable persisent cryptographic government ID on everybody's computers. This is the literal implementation of the surveillance state. Everything you do online, this token gets sent. It's the end of anonymity. Not even Tor gets around this.
> Having a physical card fallback here is a necessity and nothing in these proposals shows that the physical card ID is going away.
It doesn't have to go away. Once the capability is there, they can and probably will simply make it mandatory to even so much as get an internet connection from your ISP. No unbreakable ID chip? No internet for you.
The "fallback card" is exactly what added the necessary friction that prevented everything under the sun from demanding these sorts of verifications out of everybody alive.
It was somewhat tolerable when it was just a financial transaction. It's still highly problematic given that AML/KYC laws are just the financial arm of global warrantless mass surveillance, but at least it was contained to the financial domain and it was possible to avoid credit cards and use cash instead. Putting this stuff in every computer kicks it up into 1984 territory by allowing tracking of anyone posting wrongthink online.
I literally lol'd at the "Most analysts expect..." line.
Yea, most analysts didn't expect the cookie banner nightmare we're living in either.
To think you can get only the narrow outcomes you want with zero unintended consequences while building root-level infrastructure for 1984 just illustrates the laughable hubris of the authoritarian impulse.
Websites will do the easiest, lowest friction, and most user-familiar thing possible to comply with the laws. And that is just Google or Apple device attestation.
> Linux is not explicitly banned. Desktop Linux users could access a website and scan a QR code using a supported mobile wallet.
That's a weird way of putting it. You'll basically need a second non-Linux device if you want to use Linux.
If your reason for using Linux is "I want to continue using old hardware instead of quickly-obsoleted devices", then you're shit outta luck: you'll have to buy a (potentially second) device from one of those vendors who'll use the profits to further lobby against your rights.
And it's not just desktop _linux_ that's not allowed, but any desktop operating system, since this only works with "smartphones" not general-purpose computers.
(and of course even if they were to support computers, an age/id verification system either won't work at all or only work to be abused by those in power)
> The project’s position is that hardware binding remains required
I think you're downplaying the real risk: if TPM becomes necessary for any single routine activity (banking, communication, etc.) then the usability of any non-TPM hardware to access the internet approaches zero. What's the point of a Linux desktop that asks for attestation for every HTTP request? Or an Android phone that can't legally allow you to install APKs from beyond the Play Store?
I can't pay for things with NFC on my GrapheneOS phone because my bank doesn't trust the hardware. While this is a slight annoyance, it doesn't meaningfully affect my ability to use cards or type in numbers or authenticate with a fingerprint on my phone; however, the forced use of TPM to access anything should be rejected and protested at every step.
Encryption can never be stamped out, thankfully, but hardware is not within one's control: you get what is allowed to be sold.
If you want to actually enforce age restrictions that can be checked via some kind of digital identity I don't see how we can avoid the "trusted" hardware requirement.
The key material must be DRM'ed, especially if some ZKP solution is used.
Otherwise all underage kids would download the cool older brothers private key and load it into their GNU Taler client, buy wine and be gateway'ed into heavier Stallmanisms. Before soon EMacs would be all the rage in highschool.
(Of course we can argue the bigger points, if X should require age checks, or if this even should be done digitally etc. But there's a reason why we don't allow the physical equivalent of self-signed keys for physical ID's, they're not trustworthy)
Perhaps one could construct a bond-based system. It wouldn't help family collusion, but it would help limit people of age selling their authentication ability.
Say you have a public service and a platform site (social media, gambling, whatever), and the user does authentication in a way that anonymously proves to the platform that they're of age while revealing nothing else, and without revealing to the public service what platform they're accessing. But the protocol requires some expensive data (token that provides access to a bond account) which anybody MITMing the protocol can obtain.
Then if Alice tries to sell her age verification abilities to Bob, the protocol could be designed so either Alice learns the negotiated key and can snoop on everything Bob does, or she has to let Bob do a man-in-the-middle over a channel and lose the ability to observe what's going on after the first key exchange; and then Bob can acquire the token and make use of it at a later time.
This is very handwave-ish, but I don't think such a protocol would be impossible to design.
Under normal use, Alice has no reason to drain her own bond account. But if she's selling to an anonymous crowd who might use the token at any time (hence she can't trace the traitor), some troll is eventually going to do it.
Not exactly a fan of those either, but they're much easier to tolerate because so far they aren't implementing a surveillance state straight out of a cyberpunk dystopia just to prevent kids from driving or drinking.
It's not like the car refuses to start if a dad tries to teach his kid how to drive.
> I don't see how we can avoid the "trusted" hardware requirement.
While this is a good point, what's missing here is that this hardware doesn't have to have Google spyware and other bloatware installed. Yet with current design, this becomes mandatory.. security requirements are abused here to force unrelated software on my computer that I have to carry with me in order to participate in society.
This app should work on a dedicated device, something like a smartcard with e-ink display.. it would even be more secure because it would have less attack surface. Just like today I'm not complaining about not being able to install linux on my credit/SIM card, I'd not complain about that either. But locking down the whole OS on my smartphone is unacceptable.
We need to remember how to operate without the Internet, and de-risk our dependence on it. Whether that's reducing the use of computers in our daily lives, or getting more open-source-software-runs-offline-on-my-machine.
We did it before. We forgot at the time when things were more-or-less free.
(I don't know how we do this. I'm as dependent as ever.)
note that hardware attestation does not utilize ZKP or blind signatures. so your hardware ID is technically exposed.
usually to make use of the exposure multi-party collusion is required. Google or Apple attestation intermediaries (they convert your static certificate into an ephemeral one) would need to be logging information and when combined with information from the party you attested to (done with the ephemeral certificate) they will have your unique device identifier (the unchangeable certificate burned into the silicon).
it's doubly insidious because nothing is preventing the manufacturer from recording the certificate identifier and connecting it to an order ID for the device. so not only can they tie together multiple accounts, they could tie it to the identity that purchased the device.
on mobile devices you can't even restrict this functionality as it's exposed via API (remote attestation and also DRM license request handshake initiation). not even grapheneos gives you to option to disable it.
also, the implication of the above is that there is no private way to have a google account on an android phone. they will know it's you or the previous owner of the device who sold it to you (makes VPN irrelevant).
> a maintainer confirmed that hardware-bound attestation is a mandatory architectural requirement
Hardware-bound is not a problem, limiting that to only iPhones and some Android phones is. Plenty of hardware can keep a key safe and it doesn't need Apple's or Google's blessing.
It should be noted that this app is temporary. The EU is aiming for a digital wallet app that you can store your identity documents in and that you can use to prove facts about those documents to third parties, in a way where the third party gets no extra information--just what you chose to disclose (e.g., just your age or just your country) and that cannot be used to link your real identity to your using the site even if the site and the government share logs (this is called unlinkability).
That will not be fully ready until around 2028. They wanted the age verification available earlier and that is this app. It does not have unlinkability.
Here's the expected timeline.
The first version of the wallet app is suppose to be out by the end of this year or early 2027. It will still not be unlinkable because Apple's Secure Enclave and Android's StrongBox don't support the cryptographic operations needed for the methods that will eventually be used for that, BBS+ anonymous credentials or ZKPs. There is a variant of BBS+ that can achieve unlinkability on existing phones, but unfortunately the hardware security modules (HSMs) currently used by government when they issue you your identity credentials cannot handle BBS#.
In 2027-2028 they are supposed to upgrade the government servers so they can support BBS# or zk-SNARK and update the wallet to use those, achieving unlinkability and anonymous age (and other data) verification.
The hardware security module does not need to change to support tying to a credentials. I showed how to do this years ago and the theory was known long before. Its just that the EU is making self imposed barriers to doing this right.
> Linux is not explicitly banned. Desktop Linux users could access a website and scan a QR code using a supported mobile wallet.
Considering a significant part of the internet will be behind age verification gates, how are they imagining this to work? I should pull out my iPhone or Google Android phone and get its approval every time I want to visit a website?
As the internet become the place where people do a lot of things, no government (and especially no security services) will be able to keep themselves from trying to control it or at least monitor it. And with the new LLM features they can automatically do much more than before.
Human nature is a constant and when the government sees an easy way to enforce something, many more bureaucrats will try to do it.
I expect a gray/black market in TPM keys and the like will grow if this takes off, but hopefully the citizens will fight it very strongly before then...
More precisely tries to prevent, but there have been occasional articles about breaking TPMs here; and I suspect once they become a major obvious barrier to freedom, we're going to see a lot more attacks on them, and more successful ones too.
I searched this page for 'fascist', 'fascism', 'far left', and 'liberal' and there were no results.
A surprising little amount of criticism considering the rhetoric in any political right adjacent threads on this website. There are three mentions of 'trump'.
This is neither a far-left, far-right or centrist measure. It's a pure technocratic one, where the State and its minions believes optimize for control over the population, and matters like "privacy" or "resilience" don't appear in the cost function.
What happens if some social media site hosted in another country becomes popular and refuses to implement these age verification measures? Is the EU going to create a great firewall like China and start blacklisting sites? Are they going to ban VPN’s too? Seems like a slippery slope could easily get extremely invasive and restrictive.
It does seem like an effort to connect all online activity to real-world identities.
The downvoted comments here are very interesting, and it really shows a divide in beliefs here. I fear that there's no reconciling this, and in the end we'll need two internets: The EUternet and the USternet.
The US is moving in the same general direction, even if they take slightly different measures. The universal tracking of everyone is something all these governments can suddenly agree on.
If after this is enacted the firewalls aren't perfect, the internet will probably instead splinter into the Westernet and the everywhere-else-net for the rest of the countries that are too disorganized or uncaring to join in on the fun, maybe with a few safe havens of something resembling the old web in between.
Someone on HN suggested parents set devices up for their kids and Browsers and OS's gate by age. I haven't really been able to fault this idea.
State mandates verification and stuff like this makes me suspicious that this is much more than "protecting the children". More advocacy of alternative solutions please.
Indeed, I truly don't understand how simply enabling parental controls onto mobile devices handed to kids which then gets advertised to each website/app that they use isn't sufficient.
You make it an opt-in feature to "self-broadcast" that this device is being used by a minor. Solves 99% of the use cases. And for the remaining 1% — the really determined teenager — they'd never be stopped by this anyway. They'd social enginneer their way to access somehow.
By an incredible coincidence, the (ex- ?) employee of a company known to lobby hard in the EU (Microsoft) and who's the author of a rube-goldberg kitchen sink many of you on HN loves so much (systemd), is now working on a system that's been described here as "an attack on general purpose computing". Attestations / Trusted Platform Module (TPM) / etc. are all in there:
How much do you love your systemd and the individual behind it now?
Can't wait to use your "amutable" Linux with hardware-bound attestation verifying your age now can you?
These people (the politicians behind such decisions, the people working on such platforms, those saying it's a good thing, ...) are enemies of freedom.
This is the most mind blowingly stupid thing I've ever witnessed..and in slow motion...I'm just astonished that the EU is cheerfully walking themselves into destroying the freedoms of their own citizens without much of fight.
The most privacy-obsessed people on earth are now handing a detailed log to their entire digital lives over to a group of barely-elected 3rd party overlords as well as foreign companies and intelligence agencies (if you think this won't be instantly compromised, you're tremendously naive).
...AND at the same time this is cementing monopolies for foreign tech companies within Europe. A double whammy of self-harm.
There's something very bleak about couching this under the 90s-era "protect the children" narrative too, given ultimately most Europeans care so little about children that they've rapidly stopped giving birth to them and in many countries have outsourced all childcare to the state.
It's not even a believable cover story anymore.
It seems more like the European officials looked over at the Chinese Communist Party's authoritarian control over the internet and thought to themselves, "Wow, look how little push back they get to their policies online! I want to do big fancy projects with other peoples money and have no accountability or transparency too!"
All this ostensibly to keep teenage boys from watching Pornhub (when parental controls already exist).
The real reason, of course, is to force people to connect strong real-life identifiers to online activity. Mobile first, then Windows. Then Linux is too weak to oppose on its own, and will adapt or die.
> All this ostensibly to keep teenage boys from watching Pornhub (when parental controls already exist). The real reason ...
Maybe I'm naive, but I think there's no deeper motivation. There are activists and politicians who really believe this is a cause worth fighting for.
Maybe we should start by tracking their every movement to see if they enjoy
Of course they won't. That's why there's precisely an exemption for government personnel in Chat Control.
https://europeanpirates.eu/chatcontrol-eu-ministers-want-to-...
> The real reason, of course, is to force people to connect strong real-life identifiers to online activity.
This is worse than that, this paves a way for corporations to shove anti-user crap (adware, spyware, "sideloading" restrictions etc) to devices that are mandatory for you.. and in a way you can't fight it, because now government is protecting that crap without even realizing it.
It's one thing that I can't install a custom OS on my credit card.. but it's a different thing when that device is actively connected to the network, sending my data to some US company, prevents me from removing bloatware / installing my own software.. and on top of that displays ads.
PH endorses OS level controls though
That's a completely unhelpful, overly simplistic straw man argument.
We restrict certain activities and places in the real world from certain people all the time. For example, not allowing people under 18 or 21 (depending on your country) into casinos. What we have now is essentially unrestricted access to pretty much anything and a fair assessment is that there is societal harm from that. We're creating gambling addicts (which is arguably the most harmful form of addiction), allowing predators to interact with children,, manipulating children through advertising and algorithms, flaming harmful behaviors like eating disorders, allowing mass cyberbullying and so on.
So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed. The only question from here is what to d we do about it. You can say "nothing" but that's a losing argument.
I personally believe that the easiest thign to attack is advertising to minors. This will take away the financial incentive for these platforms to create addictive behaivors in minors. And most of these tech platforms have already built the infrastructure to do this. You don't allow advertisers to target an audience based on (actual or inferred) ages under 18. You extend that to proxies for age, like an interest in Minecraft. And you make advertising to children illegal.
Arguably, I'd go further and restrict certain features for minors, such as comments on Youtube and an algorithmic feed.
At the moment nobody is solving anything because it's simply a fight to move liability to someone else. Meta wants hardware vendors to be responsible because, guess what?, they have no hardware platform. Apple and Google likely want app to have to deal with it for the complete opposite reason.
I believe we should shift that liability to advertising.
What's simplistic and unhelpful is falling for the narrative that infinite scroll, boobies, and algorithmic feeds are somehow more harmful than ubiquitous government surveillance of the most powerful communication tool on earth. The Internet, more or less, has been around 30+ years and the Something awful and 4chan generations are now in charge. We're not much worse off. The Internet is actually way tamer these days than it used to be.
We can all agree that yeah sure this social media stuff isn't great, but that's the whole point of freedom. Fast food isn't great either but lawmakers aren't pushing for a junk food attestation framework to make sure you don't consume it more than twice a week. In other words, your best interest is not interesting to them at all. They are happy that you think it is somehow self evident that we should subject ourselves to undue surveillance through!
So, wonder why they're pushing for this so hard. I'll take the brainrot if it means criticism and ideas can spread without permanently being associated with a trackable, unchanging identity.
"Boobies" really understates what is available virtually unrestricted on Pornhub and similar sites. If "boobies" were the extent of it, far fewer people would be worried about it.
On restricting, I really think that's the responsibility of parents. I think the problem here is that Android and iOS don't empower their users (parents) to implement proper parental controls. I imagine apps don't get the access and maybe the parental controls implemented by the OS don't suffice? Maybe because Android and iOS benefit from these kinds of legislation that cement their duopoly.
I agree that none of the current user platforms, i.e. Android, iOS, nor desktop, have adequate parental controls that are easy to use. Parental controls are important but that's not enough. We expect parents to not buy liquor for their kids, and make reasonable efforts to prevent their kids from obtaining it. But we also expect liquor stores to not sell liquor to kids. We should likewise expect that internet content platforms do not deliver inappropriate content to kids.
Pornhub is incredibly restrictive about what can be uploaded and about identifying who is uploading the videos and is now also demanding proof of consent from the performers (presumably to avoid revenge porn).
If one of the most compliant actors is already "virtually unrestricted" then you just want to censor things you don't like and the censorship of porn is just a pretense for the things you actually want to censor.
Based upon this sentiment, it's already too late as 2Girls1Cup already existed and has done it's damage to the current generation who are obviously deviants!
How can we even trust these lawmakers when Blue Waffles, Tub Girl and Goatsee already existed??!
Unless it hasn't. And while it's grosser than finding a copy of Readers Wives in the park, the "think of the children" angle is overhyped.
Don't know about boobies, but I would guess META/other infinite scroll products are this generation's cigarettes in terms of long term harm and we do a severe disservice to all young people that are exposed to this product. Moreover, asking parents to intervene is obviously not going to work because they, themselves, have been partially ruined by it and lack the critical thinking required to intervene and the prowess to execute. Same reason why we needed government to intervene for cigarettes.
I am not endorsing removing all anonymity from being online, but continuing the status quo with social media is a non starter for humanity. So tell me how we can help kids not get ruined by the internet without a mechanism specifically identifying that they're online in the first place?
Then the solution could be just like the solution to tobacco addiction: tax social media companies HARD, tax all advertising on social media 10x, 20x, or ban advertising on/for social media outright, ban advertising of kids products, ban showing use of social media in movies not rated 18, ... the problem will vanish just like cigarettes.
But no, that's not what governments are doing. They want control and surveillance.
This is the most sensible solution to this problem I have read on HN in the 2 years I've been here. Think of the positive effects taxation would have: no whack-a-mole for every loophole the industry will find. No single fines after costly court battles that are basically pocket change for Zuckerberg et al. Adherence to polluter-pays-priciple. Make it so that if they stop advertising, the tax expires. Use the tax money for better infrastructue. Make the tax progressive - the more ads, the higher the tax.
Added benefit: even adults will be less exposed to addictive material.
What would be the cons of this?
Taxing or banning advertising alone would fix literally everything that is wrong with the web.
Do you know what happen when advertising is banned? It would go underground -- product placement, contest, merchandises, and so on. Advertising existed as soon as commerce became a thing, probably thousand years ago. It can't be banned. I wouldn't vote for that.
Regulation, on the other hand, is fine. How? I don't know.
> It can't be banned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
> It can't be banned
Sure it can. I don't see how being old makes it immune.
It'd be tough to phrase it right. Imagine that The Ones Who Ban Things decide to write something interpretable as essentially "nobody is allowed to inform others about things". The process of distilling any ad banning law into applicable testing of that law would be pretty scary to me
Other legistlation plays a similar game:
- Slandering laws set a limit for what you can say about others
- Copyright laws set a limit on what you can share with others under which circumstances
Both those things seem similarly complicated to implement and yet we have them.
Taxing may be a good way to restore balance. Banning means goodbye online news, Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Translate, ad-supported games, etc. -- basically everything we've become accustomed to having for free will want a monthly subscription.
> I would guess
It's going to take a lot more evidence to get me anywhere near consideration that this is a trade worth making. Again, we know that fast food can be attributed to hundreds of thousands of early deaths per anum, but we regulate that not at all. In fact it's sadly a staple of the average kids diet.
Passing laws out of fear is not how any competent legislature should operate.
> continuing the status quo with social media is a non starter for humanity. So tell me how we can help kids not get ruined by the internet without a mechanism specifically identifying that they're online
What if I told you it's very simple? We work at banning the harmful dynamics of corporate social media for everyone [0], rather than beating around the bush about kids. In fact, trying to avoid this is exactly why Faceboot et al are lobbying for this age verification crap in the first place - to escape the one tiny avenue of liability that has managed to exist, so they can keep kicking the can down the road.
Given how wholly top-down these proposals all are, frankly they would be better off being referred to as "give control of what your kids can see to the judgement of corporate attorneys.
[0] antitrust enforcement would go a long way here. Faceboot operates on online hosting service, so they should be prohibited from anticompetitively tying the client software used to access it (which necessarily includes "the algorithm").
Algorithmic scroll is factually more harmful, regardless of the amount of harm as long as it's non-zero, because it does affect people. Surveillance on its own doesn't. It just doesn't, everything that you can think of in response is not solely or even significantly caused by surveillance.
Instead, limiting surveillance (which in this case is only linked to the issue at hand with what's explicitly a conspiracy theory, so the link is quite tenuous) was originally meant to limit the government's powers as a form of control over the government. Control over the government is just a part of the Enlightenment project of societies being able to shape their destinies equitably, which includes shaping political arrangements.
Americans have completely lost the ability to shape their political system (when was the last constitutional amendment passed again?), so instead the discourse turned to fetishising particular tools that might help, but were never the point of having freedom. This is a fallacy.
There are straightforward ways to have age verification without descending into a dictatorship. To use an analogy, most European countries have mandatory IDs, some even have digital IDs; many of those counties are freer than the US.
Freedom is being able to stop kids from accessing pornhub without fearing a dictatorship because you can just prevent the dictatorship through a million other means. Freedom is not paralysing the political system as technology and progress (and multi-billion dollar megacorporations) march on.
Otherwise societies just get superficial "freedoms" (like using slurs in public spaces because "free speech") while their governments, say, run a paramilitary murdering political opponents on the street.
> We restrict certain activities and places in the real world from certain people all the time. For example, not allowing people under 18 or 21 (depending on your country) into casinos.
These are not equivalent. Restricting access to a casino just requires showing an ID to a person. A few seconds later and that person has completely forgotten everything about you. They will not keep a record of your home address, etc. Perfectly privacy preserving. You have no such guarantee when you upload government IDs to a server.
I don't think anyone here minds restricting access, but that doesn't require completely destroying ownership rights over our own devices nor internet and device privacy.
All that really needs to be done is for servers to publish what type of content they show from a parental perspective in a machine-readable format and for devices to have parental controls that only allow access to servers that publish such info and which content is allowed by the parental settings.
This should be even more effective than solutions requiring uploading IDs since there's still going to be servers out there in other jurisdictions that simply don't care for such things.
> You have no such guarantee when you upload government IDs to a server.
The problem is that so many people here look at this purely from a USA perspective.
An age check in many European requires no uploading of any ID. It’s an API call toward an ID service, it will tell you which data the service gets access to, and there’s strict regulations and liability around data retention.
I’m not concerned about the government. If they become authoritarian enough to worry, they will impose far tighter surveillance anyway. What we have now is the naive idea that just by not doing ID check, government surveillance is a solved problem in the free democratic world. It’s not. Avoiding ID checks just makes the problem worse because it makes the regular person complacent. The surveillance is implicit and hidden. If we understand that it’s nearly impossible for a non-tech person to avoid being tracked by corporations and governments, then we start working on the things that really help: super tight regulations about what can and can’t be tracked. Requiring audits of large corporations. Solutions that give corporations access to only the data they absolutely need and nothing else (the lack of such things is how we end up by uploading whole ID documents)
> The surveillance is implicit and hidden. If we understand that it’s nearly impossible for a non-tech person to avoid being tracked by corporations and governments, then we start working on the things that really help: super tight regulations about what can and can’t be tracked.
We can't get perfect privacy so we should normalize not having any? Leave it to the government we're distrusting to handle our privacy?
> If they become authoritarian enough to worry, they will impose far tighter surveillance anyway.
What is this logic? Let's not worry about creeping there because if they want it they'll force it? That's not how it works. Getting to a surveillance state needs acceptance. To get that, rather than dropping people in boiling water, you slowly heat the pot, which is what this is.
Just a few decades years ago, everyone's names and phones in the US were freely available to anyone with a phone book. Communications were done in the clear, either via letters (hardly tamper-proof), or via phone (that anyone with access could tap).
Did every American live in a "surveillance state" back then?
Bad analogy. A phone book tells you nothing about who you are talking to or what you are talking about over the phone. Most free countries don't let law enforcement read letters without a warrant. And even in authoritarian states the police couldn't wiretap everyone or read every letter. The volume was simply too massive for any manual operation.
Digitalization and now AI technology changes this drastically because it makes it drastically cheaper to record and flag human communications.
What could be tracked from phones back then compared to now is completely different. Phones are basically only called "phones" for historical reasons.
So what? Some things are exceptionally hard to track now (like e2ee messages) that were trivial to track back then.
Every remote communication could only be had in the clear. Everyone was fine with that. Was the US in the 80s a surveillance state?
Back then there was only the possibility of listening-in on particulars, and even then people did worry. They weren't fine with that. That's why there's wiretapping laws enacted in the 80s.
Today, and as things continue to progress with speech-recognition, LLMs, video recognition, etc. surveillance can be automated. It's looking conceivable to be able to process all communication population-wide in real-time. That would have been unimaginable back then.
Now, texts and calls today are only a small role of phones. For many people, it's their primary general computing device. It's how they interact with the world. It contains their entire digital life.
Couldn't look at your photo reels and videos, and diary, and every purchase you've ever made, every opinion you've ever said on a public space, every community you've ever interacted with, every location you've ever been in down to the room, from wiretapping a phone in the 80s.
> Some things are exceptionally hard to track now (like e2ee messages) that were trivial to track back then.
Can be easier than back then if stuff like chat-control comes to pass, because now the message can be obtained, processed and stored indefinitely in an automated fashion for everybody at once. E2EE becomes security theater for the most part.
You just said it yourself: the perceived danger of overreach was averted through new laws and control over what the government is doing.
If citizens still have a capacity to restrict the government via (enforced) laws, it doesn't matter much that the communications are in the clear. You can layer something on top just to be sure, but the foundation is laws and a functioning political system.
If there's no functioning political system, the government will just do whatever, like buying the same data they ostensibly can't collect from commercial providers (who weren't restricted from collecting it because there's no US GDPR).
If a country has a functioning political system, it can just do things like ban gun ownership, introduce mandatory IDs, publish everyone's yearly income, or criminalise calling other people slurs in public and not become an uncontrollable dictatorship. If it doesn't, corruption and democratic backsliding will happen regardless. Hyper-focusing on a few tools and superficial traits of a particular system in a particular moment is myopic.
> You just said it yourself: the perceived danger of overreach was averted through new laws and control over what the government is doing. If citizens still have a capacity to restrict the government via (enforced) laws
Restricting the government via laws... The government implements the laws. Trying to restrict the government via laws is mostly just asking "pretty-please don't screw us over." They're not going to make a difference to a corrupt government. Government corruption will become more enticing too because of the added concentration of power it would have. How have laws been working for restricting Trump? He's shown how easily they can be sidestepped and manipulated.
Also, back then implementing end-to-end encryption of all calls wasn't feasible. That would have been the preferred option. It's feasible now. We have it. Why rely on something as fallible as government-restricting laws when we have better options?
It's better for power to be decentralized, as it is with every device owner having sole access to their own devices. As well as being able to communicate anonymously, which is huge for matters of free-speech and democracy.
Indeed, Trump is a great example of democratic backsliding completely unfettered by "freedoms" often mistaken for the actual freedom. The way forward is being able to change things or regaining this ability if it's lost, not trying to carve out some bit that's not under the government's control yet. That's just a form of escapism.
There is a malaise permeating modern culture, where social action does not enter the mind at all, possibly because it does not provide instant results. Collective action and organising local communities has always been the solution to social ills. It's why I'm looking forward to the progressives in US, they seem to be organising themselves quite well.
Any time I've been in an age-restricted venue here in Australia they have taken a picture of me and my ID at the door.
do parents not control routers and cell plans? I feel like it would be easy to look here for header based solutions. They probably exist tbh. Then just ban your kid from VPNs.
> So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed.
The market failure to provide an adequate solution wasn't natural. It was engineered by the tech companies and you are playing right into their hands. There is still a way to fix this from the root with software antitrust: force hardware vendors to ship their devices without an operating system.
Here's a more detailed explanation in a past comment about how the problem came to be in the first place, and why software antitrust can solve it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578
> I personally believe that the easiest thign to attack is advertising to minors.
Well then, let's regulate this instead? Advertising companies already make a pretty good guess about a person's age. It doesn't require 3rd parties and age verification.
But we won't — this isn't why identity checks are getting lobbied.
> I believe we should shift that liability to advertising.
I am confused. Are you saying that advertising companies should handle these identity checks? So let's just hand out a unique identifier to the companies who have monetary interest in this? Surely this will end well.
> So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed.
Absolute bullshit. This "unfettered access" is the whole reason why I am who I am today, why I am here. Not only did it not fail, it's in fact so successful it threatens the powers that be, and that's the real reason why they want to ban it.
> I personally believe that the easiest thign to attack is advertising to minors.
Now this I agree with. I would be even more radical. It's not just advertising "to minors", all advertising needs to get banned straight up. Advertising is mind rape. Ban it and all the problems with the web will be fixed literally overnight, including the problems "mandated hardware attestation" aims to solve. There is no need whatsoever for this attestation nonsense.
What you're saying is correct - but it's used to push a much more comprehensive lockdown of devices that has absolutely nothing to do with protection of minors.
It's as if the government first let businesses install slot machines at every street corner, then suddenly went "I'm shocked, shocked! that we have a massive epidemic of gambling addiction here, we have to mandate anti-gambling shock collars for everyone to tackle this urgent problem! There is no alternative!"
This is the slippery slope fallacy and people in tech seem to love this argument. And you can argue in whichever direction you want with it.
For example, "unfettered Internet access is just a series of tubes (shout out to Ted Stevens for that one) for pedophiles to rape your children." So now what? Is it your hyperbole against mine?
The problem is that people are operating under a myth that they have anonymity. You don't. You're one subpoena away from being unmasked online and individuals can do it (eg [1]). When governments do it, they can do it in secret. National Security Letters, pen registers, FISA warrants, etc.
So the idea that "age verification is the first step to a more comprehensive" is flawed in both logical construction (being a fallacy) and that ship has already sailed.
[1]: https://chambers.com/articles/internet-harassment-lawyer
But in this case, the slipping just happened. This thread is about how an app that will be required for using a vast fraction of all websites will require hardware attestation and likely only run on closed, non-rooted mobile OSes. That's not a hypothetical scenario, it's literally what this thread is about.
Maybe it's reasonable to argue a slope is slippery if you've just seen someone lubricate it.
We must do something.
This is something.
Therefore, we must do this.
>So saying "we should allow unfettered access to the internet" or even "it's the parents' responsibility" is naive, dismissive and has failed.
How has it failed? Whats the measure of a successful freedom vs an unsuccessful one.
>The only question from here is what to d we do about it. You can say "nothing" but that's a losing argument.
No its the positive case for action that remains to be justified.
>> "We're creating gambling addicts (which is arguably the most harmful form of addiction)" --- I will need a source, because "arguably" is a very broad umbrella.
"Arguably" heroin addiction is the most harmful addiction because heroin is the most addictive substance, clouds judgement and drives the addict to all manners of sociopathic behaviour (not only theft or prostitition)
One big difference is that heroin is mostly illegal or, if not outright illegal, decriminalized for personal use. Gambling is legal in most places, can be advertised quite freely and restrictions can be easily circumvented with crypto. Crypto casinos have little to no age verification and typically operate extrajudicially (from the victim). Gambling addiction has a high outcome of suicide and tends to leave financial ruin affecting not just that person but their entire family.
Heroin addiction was largely created by the criminialization of cannabis (the first so-called War on Drugs under Nixon) as a tool to persecute black people and war protesters and the overprescription of opioids (eg the Sacklers/Purdue).
That last sentence is neither here not there. I don't think gambling is good; I would have it gone from the internet and reserved to casinos. There is no MORAL justification to push for government control so gambling online can be legal.
Fentanyl, no?
Fentanyl is another opioid, like heroin; it also has a very high addictive potential. But, if I am not mistaken, the real problem with fentanyl is that dealers contaminate other drugs with fentanyl, which becomes lethal when not done correctly (and dealers aren't very responsible)
There should be real life identifiers connecting to online activity. Why should online actions be untraceable? That only empowers bad actors.
I don't see your real name on your user page, unless your parents named you AuthAuth.
Bad actors will stay untraceable.
What specific generalized problem would you like to be solved that you advocate for such a generalized solution?
Goodbye whistleblowing.
I don't understand where the all the EU anti-trust and anti-corruption regulators are here. _Governments_ enforcing that you have a Google or Apple account to participate in society is transparently absurd.
This isn't only a digital sovereignty issue, it's also an anti-competition issue.
This is the correct intuition. The problem can be solved with antitrust by forcing hardware vendors to ship their devices without an operating system. Then the market will deliver the parenting solutions that don't require mass surveillance. We're currently being blocked from doing so by anti-competitive measures.
For a more detailed explanation of what the root of the problem is, see a past comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578
The EU way is to think these things are “free” and then act surprised by the inevitable consequences five years later when it is irreversible.
Our AI gods cannot save us soon enough.
What are the "AI gods" going to do in this scenario?
AI is about many things, but a big factor is enclosure.
Their solution is to "force open" iOS and Android through the DMA, not to create competition which they know won't work.
The reality of the matter is that it is virtually impossible for Europe to even begin to displace Apple or Google devices, and especially not operating systems and all the ecosystem that goes along with it.
The EU politicians are just publicly paying lip-service to "digital sovereignty" while they quietly hope this all just blows over when Trump is gone in 2 years.
> it is virtually impossible for Europe to even begin to displace Apple or Google devices
It's hard for sure but they are not even trying, the non-duopoly alternatives are run by hobbyists in their free time and just get shit on by EU bureaucrats
Agreed, I doubt that a mega-behemoth like Google or Microsoft could emerge in Europe. Especially not on a compressed timescale.
But if they really wanted digital verification without the surveillance capitalism built in, I’m sure there are plenty of companies that could do it. Especially if it was around an open source framework.
Anti-corruption regulators are paid to look away. If they start investigating corruption like e.g. Ukraine does, then the EU countries will be perceived as corrupt. The goal of these institutions is to keep things under the rug so to speak.
That's why you barely see anything being done and yet everyone can see how corrupt things are.
My understanding is that you are not forced to use this. Sites in the EU that will be required to verify user age will be free to use any method they wish as long as they can show it is as effective as the app and it does not violate privacy laws.
Most analysts expect sites will offer multiple ways, for a variety of reasons.
Eventually when the full EU Digital Identity Wallet is available age checks can be done using that and the age-only app will go away. For the full wallet the rules explicitly require platforms to have fallback mechanisms for users who are not using the digital wallet.
And how, exactly, will one acquire this "full EU Digital Identity Wallet"? Will I be able to compile it from source and run it on a computing device of my own choosing?
> Most analysts expect
Total bullshit.
There is no "effective" method without hardware remote attestation. If I control the system, I can just spoof whatever "verification" it is you're asking.
The whole point of hardware attestation is to put a cryptographic key in the computer that the users can't ever get at, then use that key to prove the computer booted a corporate owned operating system that's 100% aligned with government and capitalist surveillance and other cyberpunk dystopia nonsense.
Install a custom system that you control and they will say you have "tampered" with your device, and that transgression will get you ostracized from digital society.
This is what will happen, and if we let it happen might as well close down this site because everything the word hacker ever stood for will have been destroyed.
You can of course create an independent attestation database at any time and mandate its use - verifying that the custom OS you use fits minimum security requirements for digital ID use.
We use that approach in several other industries.
But.... that requires work beyond just complaining.
> You can of course create an independent attestation database at any time
Ah yes. They're totally going to trust my self-signed certificates. They're totally not going to restrict their trust set to the corporate owned and surveillance friendly Google and Apple devices.
Come on now.
> minimum security requirements for digital ID use
Also known as "the user has no control over the device".
Because users who have control can simply spoof this silly "digital ID" and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
> We use that approach in several other industries.
Your industries include the user of the device in their threat models. They want the device secured against the user. Absolutely unacceptable.
> Ah yes. They're totally going to trust my self-signed certificates. They're totally not going to restrict their trust set to the corporate owned and surveillance friendly Google and Apple devices.
That sounds mostly like copium just to motivate your complete inaction.
Again - independent, EU based, attestation database is completely possible to make and we're using similar approval processes across multiple industries to certify hardware - locally, here in EU.
But yea, if you think you'll be able to print passport at home and then go travel and demand that government recognizes that as an ID document, you're a bit optimistic.
> we're using similar approval processes across multiple industries to certify hardware
Why not tell us more about the requirements for hardware certification?
Seriously doubt it's anything but the usual war on general purpose computing.
Requirement #1, the computer runs the mandated surveillance software.
Requirement #2, the computer does not allow the user to run any software not approved by the government.
Requirement #3, the computer resists tampering so as to preserve the previous requirements.
> Why not tell us more about the requirements for hardware certification?
Err, it's actually pretty simple: the token/certificate representing your ID (or credit card, or anything really) cannot be exfiltrated by userspace or installed kernel space apps or intercepted on the way to TPM when issued. And it cannot be duplicated.
It's the same set of requirements that are put on credit card smart chips and biometric chips in EU IDs and Passports (which are essentially also TPMs).
But sure, it's a all an evil conspiracy against general purpose computing. And they're all out to get ya. Now smash that downvote for a vote against the evil establishment.
> cannot be exfiltrated by userspace or installed kernel space apps or intercepted on the way to TPM
So it must be secure against the user, as expected.
Preventing the user from "tampering" with the token means carving out a section of the machine and putting it out of his reach. You just created a government embassy on the user's machine. There's no telling what it will be abused for, and there's no escape.
> But sure, it's a all an evil conspiracy against general purpose computing.
You just advocated for putting an inescapable persisent cryptographic government ID on everybody's computers. This is the literal implementation of the surveillance state. Everything you do online, this token gets sent. It's the end of anonymity. Not even Tor gets around this.
Yes, that's what a TPM or smart card chip in your ID/Passport does.
Prevents tampering even by the "user".
I have advocated nothing of the sort you're accusing me of. Please leave your strawman at home.
Having a physical card fallback here is a necessity and nothing in these proposals shows that the physical card ID is going away.
> Having a physical card fallback here is a necessity and nothing in these proposals shows that the physical card ID is going away.
It doesn't have to go away. Once the capability is there, they can and probably will simply make it mandatory to even so much as get an internet connection from your ISP. No unbreakable ID chip? No internet for you.
The "fallback card" is exactly what added the necessary friction that prevented everything under the sun from demanding these sorts of verifications out of everybody alive.
It was somewhat tolerable when it was just a financial transaction. It's still highly problematic given that AML/KYC laws are just the financial arm of global warrantless mass surveillance, but at least it was contained to the financial domain and it was possible to avoid credit cards and use cash instead. Putting this stuff in every computer kicks it up into 1984 territory by allowing tracking of anyone posting wrongthink online.
In most EU states you already need to provide ID to establish internet service, so what are you on about man?
I literally lol'd at the "Most analysts expect..." line.
Yea, most analysts didn't expect the cookie banner nightmare we're living in either.
To think you can get only the narrow outcomes you want with zero unintended consequences while building root-level infrastructure for 1984 just illustrates the laughable hubris of the authoritarian impulse.
"Most analysts" actually expect the opposite:
https://waag.org/en/article/european-digital-id-wallets-are-...
Websites will do the easiest, lowest friction, and most user-familiar thing possible to comply with the laws. And that is just Google or Apple device attestation.
> Linux is not explicitly banned. Desktop Linux users could access a website and scan a QR code using a supported mobile wallet.
That's a weird way of putting it. You'll basically need a second non-Linux device if you want to use Linux.
If your reason for using Linux is "I want to continue using old hardware instead of quickly-obsoleted devices", then you're shit outta luck: you'll have to buy a (potentially second) device from one of those vendors who'll use the profits to further lobby against your rights.
And it's not just desktop _linux_ that's not allowed, but any desktop operating system, since this only works with "smartphones" not general-purpose computers.
(and of course even if they were to support computers, an age/id verification system either won't work at all or only work to be abused by those in power)
> The project’s position is that hardware binding remains required
I think you're downplaying the real risk: if TPM becomes necessary for any single routine activity (banking, communication, etc.) then the usability of any non-TPM hardware to access the internet approaches zero. What's the point of a Linux desktop that asks for attestation for every HTTP request? Or an Android phone that can't legally allow you to install APKs from beyond the Play Store?
I can't pay for things with NFC on my GrapheneOS phone because my bank doesn't trust the hardware. While this is a slight annoyance, it doesn't meaningfully affect my ability to use cards or type in numbers or authenticate with a fingerprint on my phone; however, the forced use of TPM to access anything should be rejected and protested at every step.
Encryption can never be stamped out, thankfully, but hardware is not within one's control: you get what is allowed to be sold.
If you want to actually enforce age restrictions that can be checked via some kind of digital identity I don't see how we can avoid the "trusted" hardware requirement.
The key material must be DRM'ed, especially if some ZKP solution is used.
Otherwise all underage kids would download the cool older brothers private key and load it into their GNU Taler client, buy wine and be gateway'ed into heavier Stallmanisms. Before soon EMacs would be all the rage in highschool.
(Of course we can argue the bigger points, if X should require age checks, or if this even should be done digitally etc. But there's a reason why we don't allow the physical equivalent of self-signed keys for physical ID's, they're not trustworthy)
Perhaps one could construct a bond-based system. It wouldn't help family collusion, but it would help limit people of age selling their authentication ability.
Say you have a public service and a platform site (social media, gambling, whatever), and the user does authentication in a way that anonymously proves to the platform that they're of age while revealing nothing else, and without revealing to the public service what platform they're accessing. But the protocol requires some expensive data (token that provides access to a bond account) which anybody MITMing the protocol can obtain.
Then if Alice tries to sell her age verification abilities to Bob, the protocol could be designed so either Alice learns the negotiated key and can snoop on everything Bob does, or she has to let Bob do a man-in-the-middle over a channel and lose the ability to observe what's going on after the first key exchange; and then Bob can acquire the token and make use of it at a later time.
This is very handwave-ish, but I don't think such a protocol would be impossible to design.
Under normal use, Alice has no reason to drain her own bond account. But if she's selling to an anonymous crowd who might use the token at any time (hence she can't trace the traitor), some troll is eventually going to do it.
> If you want to actually enforce age restrictions
I don't.
This "think of the kids" nonsense is a psyop to manufacture consent for this shit. People really need to stop falling for it.
Do you also oppose drivers licensing, alcohol age limits? Those rely on a trusted ID managed by a government.
Not exactly a fan of those either, but they're much easier to tolerate because so far they aren't implementing a surveillance state straight out of a cyberpunk dystopia just to prevent kids from driving or drinking.
It's not like the car refuses to start if a dad tries to teach his kid how to drive.
Xkcd 538. Hardware attestation is not required because it's not sufficient, you need to plug all the other much easier ways to get around the system.
Firstly, you need to comprehensively ban VPNs, probably with some great firewall setup.
Secondly, you need to install CCTV in people's homes to make sure that nobody uses someone else's device to get around the system.
Then it's time for hardware attestation.
> I don't see how we can avoid the "trusted" hardware requirement.
While this is a good point, what's missing here is that this hardware doesn't have to have Google spyware and other bloatware installed. Yet with current design, this becomes mandatory.. security requirements are abused here to force unrelated software on my computer that I have to carry with me in order to participate in society.
This app should work on a dedicated device, something like a smartcard with e-ink display.. it would even be more secure because it would have less attack surface. Just like today I'm not complaining about not being able to install linux on my credit/SIM card, I'd not complain about that either. But locking down the whole OS on my smartphone is unacceptable.
We need to remember how to operate without the Internet, and de-risk our dependence on it. Whether that's reducing the use of computers in our daily lives, or getting more open-source-software-runs-offline-on-my-machine.
We did it before. We forgot at the time when things were more-or-less free.
(I don't know how we do this. I'm as dependent as ever.)
So much for the EU's mission to reduce e-waste.
note that hardware attestation does not utilize ZKP or blind signatures. so your hardware ID is technically exposed.
usually to make use of the exposure multi-party collusion is required. Google or Apple attestation intermediaries (they convert your static certificate into an ephemeral one) would need to be logging information and when combined with information from the party you attested to (done with the ephemeral certificate) they will have your unique device identifier (the unchangeable certificate burned into the silicon).
it's doubly insidious because nothing is preventing the manufacturer from recording the certificate identifier and connecting it to an order ID for the device. so not only can they tie together multiple accounts, they could tie it to the identity that purchased the device.
on mobile devices you can't even restrict this functionality as it's exposed via API (remote attestation and also DRM license request handshake initiation). not even grapheneos gives you to option to disable it.
also, the implication of the above is that there is no private way to have a google account on an android phone. they will know it's you or the previous owner of the device who sold it to you (makes VPN irrelevant).
> a maintainer confirmed that hardware-bound attestation is a mandatory architectural requirement
Hardware-bound is not a problem, limiting that to only iPhones and some Android phones is. Plenty of hardware can keep a key safe and it doesn't need Apple's or Google's blessing.
It should be noted that this app is temporary. The EU is aiming for a digital wallet app that you can store your identity documents in and that you can use to prove facts about those documents to third parties, in a way where the third party gets no extra information--just what you chose to disclose (e.g., just your age or just your country) and that cannot be used to link your real identity to your using the site even if the site and the government share logs (this is called unlinkability).
That will not be fully ready until around 2028. They wanted the age verification available earlier and that is this app. It does not have unlinkability.
Here's the expected timeline.
The first version of the wallet app is suppose to be out by the end of this year or early 2027. It will still not be unlinkable because Apple's Secure Enclave and Android's StrongBox don't support the cryptographic operations needed for the methods that will eventually be used for that, BBS+ anonymous credentials or ZKPs. There is a variant of BBS+ that can achieve unlinkability on existing phones, but unfortunately the hardware security modules (HSMs) currently used by government when they issue you your identity credentials cannot handle BBS#.
In 2027-2028 they are supposed to upgrade the government servers so they can support BBS# or zk-SNARK and update the wallet to use those, achieving unlinkability and anonymous age (and other data) verification.
> It should be noted that this app is temporary.
Don't believe that for a second. Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
The concept of an income tax was originally supposed to be temporary.
And passports too.
The hardware security module does not need to change to support tying to a credentials. I showed how to do this years ago and the theory was known long before. Its just that the EU is making self imposed barriers to doing this right.
Here comes the European freedom and free speech. With Chat Control it’s even more hilarious. Compliance list, another European Commission, as always.
> Linux is not explicitly banned. Desktop Linux users could access a website and scan a QR code using a supported mobile wallet.
Considering a significant part of the internet will be behind age verification gates, how are they imagining this to work? I should pull out my iPhone or Google Android phone and get its approval every time I want to visit a website?
Most countries allow tapping your ID card to a reader device as well.
Cory Doctorow had a very profound talk about it very long time ago (10+years).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
As the internet become the place where people do a lot of things, no government (and especially no security services) will be able to keep themselves from trying to control it or at least monitor it. And with the new LLM features they can automatically do much more than before.
Human nature is a constant and when the government sees an easy way to enforce something, many more bureaucrats will try to do it.
I predict that teenagers with irresponsible parents will continue to use social media and online anonymity will get worse.
Related:
European "age verification" "app" forcing everyone to use Android or iOS
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48903777
Stop Killing the Internet: No Digital ID and No Age Verification
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49084938
The article mentions "approved applications". What role, if any, do apps play in age verification if it's implemented in hardware?
There it is. That's what this "age verification" nonsense was all about. Predictably, the unceasing "think of the kids" rhetoric came down to THIS.
Absolute control over people's computers.
It's not your computer anymore, it's the government's.
I expect a gray/black market in TPM keys and the like will grow if this takes off, but hopefully the citizens will fight it very strongly before then...
...but then again, this is the EU, not the US.
Hardware attestation literally prevents that. That's why it's mandated.
More precisely tries to prevent, but there have been occasional articles about breaking TPMs here; and I suspect once they become a major obvious barrier to freedom, we're going to see a lot more attacks on them, and more successful ones too.
I searched this page for 'fascist', 'fascism', 'far left', and 'liberal' and there were no results.
A surprising little amount of criticism considering the rhetoric in any political right adjacent threads on this website. There are three mentions of 'trump'.
This is neither a far-left, far-right or centrist measure. It's a pure technocratic one, where the State and its minions believes optimize for control over the population, and matters like "privacy" or "resilience" don't appear in the cost function.
What happens if some social media site hosted in another country becomes popular and refuses to implement these age verification measures? Is the EU going to create a great firewall like China and start blacklisting sites? Are they going to ban VPN’s too? Seems like a slippery slope could easily get extremely invasive and restrictive.
It does seem like an effort to connect all online activity to real-world identities.
https://diginomica.com/eu-policy-doc-recommends-building-eur...
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/6487...
"Like the Chinese firewall, this European internet would block off services that condone or support unlawful conduct from third party countries."
Sound familiar?
The downvoted comments here are very interesting, and it really shows a divide in beliefs here. I fear that there's no reconciling this, and in the end we'll need two internets: The EUternet and the USternet.
The US is moving in the same general direction, even if they take slightly different measures. The universal tracking of everyone is something all these governments can suddenly agree on.
If after this is enacted the firewalls aren't perfect, the internet will probably instead splinter into the Westernet and the everywhere-else-net for the rest of the countries that are too disorganized or uncaring to join in on the fun, maybe with a few safe havens of something resembling the old web in between.
Someone on HN suggested parents set devices up for their kids and Browsers and OS's gate by age. I haven't really been able to fault this idea.
State mandates verification and stuff like this makes me suspicious that this is much more than "protecting the children". More advocacy of alternative solutions please.
Indeed, I truly don't understand how simply enabling parental controls onto mobile devices handed to kids which then gets advertised to each website/app that they use isn't sufficient.
You make it an opt-in feature to "self-broadcast" that this device is being used by a minor. Solves 99% of the use cases. And for the remaining 1% — the really determined teenager — they'd never be stopped by this anyway. They'd social enginneer their way to access somehow.
By an incredible coincidence, the (ex- ?) employee of a company known to lobby hard in the EU (Microsoft) and who's the author of a rube-goldberg kitchen sink many of you on HN loves so much (systemd), is now working on a system that's been described here as "an attack on general purpose computing". Attestations / Trusted Platform Module (TPM) / etc. are all in there:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
How much do you love your systemd and the individual behind it now?
Can't wait to use your "amutable" Linux with hardware-bound attestation verifying your age now can you?
These people (the politicians behind such decisions, the people working on such platforms, those saying it's a good thing, ...) are enemies of freedom.
This is the most mind blowingly stupid thing I've ever witnessed..and in slow motion...I'm just astonished that the EU is cheerfully walking themselves into destroying the freedoms of their own citizens without much of fight.
The most privacy-obsessed people on earth are now handing a detailed log to their entire digital lives over to a group of barely-elected 3rd party overlords as well as foreign companies and intelligence agencies (if you think this won't be instantly compromised, you're tremendously naive).
...AND at the same time this is cementing monopolies for foreign tech companies within Europe. A double whammy of self-harm.
There's something very bleak about couching this under the 90s-era "protect the children" narrative too, given ultimately most Europeans care so little about children that they've rapidly stopped giving birth to them and in many countries have outsourced all childcare to the state.
It's not even a believable cover story anymore.
It seems more like the European officials looked over at the Chinese Communist Party's authoritarian control over the internet and thought to themselves, "Wow, look how little push back they get to their policies online! I want to do big fancy projects with other peoples money and have no accountability or transparency too!"