It's pretty insane that we have no check for an unlimited amount of free porn with all kinds of extremes.
It fucks up a lot of kids (and adults).
Showing porn to a random kid on the street would have you catch a charge if not something worse, but somehow on the Internet it's just fine?
And... we still don't. Porn is available through a lot of channels to anybody who knows how to look, all the NC law (and others) is doing is applying pressure to a handful of businesses and encouraging bad practices in the form of having to handle IDs.
I'm the first to acknowledge it's sometimes worth doing something imperfect if it'll improve things, even if it's not 100% effective. But this isn't likely to be 10% effective, much less 90% or 100% effective. Anybody who wants to can dredge up tons of porn on any number of other sites, torrents, etc.
As others have said, it's one thing to have to flash an ID at a convenience store or to enter a business where there's nudity, etc., but here you're requiring people to pass their info online. That's bad policy, and I doubt it's even in good faith that the legislators really think it'll do anything to curb access by those under 18.
It's designed to target sites like PornHub and to give government a cudgel against all kinds of content that most wouldn't consider "porn" to begin with. And they want to go after LGBTQ+ content on the basis that it's LGBTQ+ -- not that it's necessarily adult in nature. [1]
There's little chance that you're going to come anywhere close to preventing motivated people from seeing porn on the Internet laws and policy like this. If you have kids that you don't want accessing porn, then you need to take steps to monitor their access and have the hard conversations with them.
(I am less alarmist about the "dangers" of kids accessing porn, but I will agree that unfettered access at a young age especially if parents aren't teaching their kids adequately about sexuality and that porn isn't a good representation is not great.)
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/17/masculine-policy-the-gop...
I think a reasonable analogy would be putting
TV's playing porn outside of a school and covered
them with a cloth and sign that said adults only.
Strongly suggest dropping the analogies entirely.
Like many digital concepts this just will never map cleanly to a real-world analogue.
This is like the millions of bad analogies related to music downloads back in the Napster days. Please, stop. This is an issue worth discussing, but every analogy is bad and every analogy pollutes and enshittifies the discussion.
Why should minors be allowed on the internet unsupervised at all?
Not to someone wearing a Google Glass device, taking a snapshot of it.
That which is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.