The unlikely upside to age-gating
In an attempt to address the harms caused by algorithmic social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, governments around the world are scrambling to put barriers up to stop youngsters from being led astray, instead of, you know, regulating the companies peddling these harms.
What seems laudable on the surface, the idea behind age gating certain parts of the internet is flawed for a number of reasons, mainly the one where you hand over your precious data to a barely-regulated third party and hope they don’t leave it on the bus. However, today I’m not going to talk about that.
I told you I was going to stay positive and gosh darn-it I am sticking to that. Anyway, I’ve found an upside.
Where there are no walls
These big platforms, with all their billions are going to have to stop people from coming in if they have no ID. Many of them already do, particularly the ones in the Meta universe. This is actually great news. I would have preferred it if they were regulated out of existence, but do you know where they are not going to be asking for you to potentially doxx yourself?
That’s right, the open internet.
What the regulations say...
Currently, the Online Safety Act 2023 as it is currently written is primarily concerned with what it calls ‘user to user’ services and with search engines. User-to-user services are mainly those we know as Web 2.0 --the Facebook, Twitter and YouTube type services on the internet. However, it does not include email, SMS messaging apps or voice calls.
It also doesn’t include what you might call good old fashioned websites.
I know I’ve been banging on about this for a little while now, but these modern yet slightly old-fashioned websites we old farts grew up with often collect no data whatsoever. This site doesn’t even have analytics, as life is too short to worry about how many clicks I am getting.
You can view this website without ID. But better yet, you can create your own website without ID too. Shh, don’t say that too loudly.
If you have a youngster in the house, or just someone who wants to practice their writing skills and exercise their creativity on the internet, get them blogging. Teach them some basic HTML and get them creating a static site on Neocities, or get them writing on Bear, Micro.blog or Pika.
They can be as anonymous as they want to be; they can talk about anything they want to. They can link to their friends blogs and start one of those wonderful web rings.
Best of all, there won’t be an app on their phone following them around trying to sell them insecurity and self-loathing.
Aging Out
As I’ve said before, I love the internet. However, I am acutely aware that I’m not as young as I used to be. I would love to see the younger generations take the reins and start building the internet in their own image.
For we old farts, we have every reason to be suspicious of the companies doing the age verification and every reason to never, ever deal with them.
Let us go back to building out the open internet we knew and loved back in the 90s and early 2000s, with as much quirkiness and personality as we can muster.
If the features of these new laws start to creep and we find ourselves back in the pre-internet era unless we hand over what we hold most dear (our personal data), I have hope that we will find other ways to share, even if that involves resurrecting the sneaker net.
USB sticks at the ready.
