Age verification becomes more common. Australia, France, etc. introduce such laws to ban children below 15 years from social media platforms, to protect them.
Will these laws also be relevant to fediverse/lemmy specifically?
Personally I think these laws will focus on the big platforms at first (facebook/meta, youtube, discord, instagramm), which will force younger users with technical skills onto smaller and niche sites. Over time focus on this question will increase for the fediverse.
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Countries don’t need Great Firewalls for things that are becoming “consensus” globally (such as biometrics for web access): the way Internet works is, itself, a Great Firewall. Govs govern over their respective ccTLDs, telecom regulators (FCC, Anatel, etc) govern ISPs, as well as EM allocation (so Meshtastic and similar radio approaches for Internet-less networks could also be ruled “unlawful” whenever they want). IANA governs which countries and ISPs got which sets of IP numbers (IPv4/IPv6), ICANN governs TLD attribution to countries and corps (there are corps with their own TLDs, such as .google, ICANN is always involved as the ultimate “DNS keepers”). Then there are things such as CloudFlare, increasingly omnipresent (insofar large swathes of the Web go down whenever CloudFlare goes down). So the Internet is already heavily centralized, making it trivial for countries to enforce something when said thing transcends geographical boundaries, such as the “protect children”.
Great Firewalls are only a thing for imposing local politics, and it’s not always recognized as so: Brazil, for instance, have already been banning apps and platforms (ANATEL have been taking down entire IPTV servers, judiciary have been taking down social media platforms; I’m not entering the merit of it, just saying it’s already a thing around here), and we don’t hear “Brazil has a Great Firewall”.
We could think that corps are implementing checking mechanisms unwillingly. In fact, they’re the ones who profit the most: age checking means a new fingerprinting factor, even when age checking is “anonimized” (it still got a unique session identifier, moreso than commonly-used fingerprinting mechanisms). Ad partners are cheering!
Dark web: as much as I’m fond of it and used to participate there (Onion, I2P, former “Freenet” now “Hyphanet”, among others), they’re also reliant on Internet infrastructure. And when there are fewer countries where there’s still a regulation vacuum, there are fewer places to use as a bridge/router.
Then, something I didn’t mention before because it wouldn’t fit the char limit: the hardware and software oligopolies. No matter which OS and software we use, we’re still reliant on Intel, AMD or Qualcomm processors. We’re also still reliant on two major browser engines (Chromium and Firefox). The Tor Browser needs to be run inside a device with a CPU, and it also needs… a browser engine. Both engines are going down the AI road, maybe browser forks (inc. Tor Browser) are still managing to prune the clankers from the upstream, but the upstream is still needed to implement the fork, and the upstream can easily be bundled with binary blobs as dependencies for fundamental functions in the software (similarly to how, e.g., Windows Shell is dependent on Microsoft Edge so Edge can’t be pruned without crashing the whole OS)
Web is so entangled, it’s becoming increasingly hard to avoid the enshittification. ☹