The attempt to strip the internet of anonimity
Disregarding the fact that these states all seem to be under the impression that it's impossible to be a parent to your child when they interact with things online.
- https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/S6418
- https://wehco.media.clients.ellingtoncms.com/news/documents/2023/01/31/SB66_-_Steve_Goff.pdf
Feel free to read either bill, but the point is clear enough, in the name of protecting the children, we are slowly working to strip our rights to anonymity; because, when you think about this for more than 10 seconds you'll realize that so long as anonymity exist it is impossible to truly tie an ID to an IP Address. This is in part why I have been so harsh on Discord Administrators who have been collecting ID's in exchange for access to NSFW sections of their channels.
Ignoring for a moment that even if the ID is fake, it doesn't protect you as as an admin from prosecution, there is the greater problem that you can not verify a person's ID online. This is because you can't see the actual human being giving you the ID. Yes they can send you a picture, but you have no way to verify that the person who took that picture is in fact the person who is sending it to you. You have no way to verify that the ID isn't fake.
And even if you do have access to state databases (which as it stands will take literal mountains of time to verify), you still don't have a way to prove that the individual who gave it to you over the internet is the actual owner of that ID. It's a process that relies on real human beings interacting for a reason.
In order to make this process work online, the only way to actually make that process remotely feasible, it would be incumbent upon the ISP to link a given IP to a given individual, and even then you'd have to further subdivide by household to make sure the device in question is only tied to a single user or individual. That level of invasiveness is something unheard of in American society.
Now mind you, the anti porn portion of this is being pushed by Project 2025 , a conservative proto fascist group that is attempting to push as Christian ethnostate. As part of that, because every single bill that has been passed is the exact same copy pasted mess, there's a key line in each of them
The material taken as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors;
It's in almost every version of this bill that's circulated through the various states and is in reference to what qualifies as "needing an ID" to prove that the individual accessing isn't a child. It has broad implications for the LGBQTIA+ community, as all to often they find themselves the primary target of this kind of broad and undefined language. But to take it further, it's turning over to the government the ability to set what should and shouldn't require your ID to interact with.
We joke about the Chinese Great Firewall, and then ban tik tok as a "Foreign Adversarial" software, with broad and sweeping language in the law to allow the US to block other "Foreign Adversarial Software." Ignoring of course that the anti tik tok law has been pushed hard by Meta and other major US social media companies in an attempt to eliminate the competition while at the same time not letting US lawmakers even begin to approach a comprehensive online privacy lawset, it speaks to a growing series of legal maneuvers intended to further consolidate the internet and access to the internet only to those which government institutions wish to allow.
I should hope the dangers of this are clear enough on their face, and if I were the advice giving type, I would say you should probably reach out to law makers in your area asking them to create comprehensive privacy laws rather then trying to work on unwinding internet anonymity.
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