The “KIDS Act” Is an Age Surveillance Bill, Take Action. Tell Congress to reject this age-gating bill
Within the next week, Congress is preparing to vote on the KIDS Act, a sprawling package of legislation that seeks to control Americans’ web browsing and private messaging. The package includes a revised version of the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, combined with a collection of other internet bills, study bills, reporting requirements, and new regulations. Instead of debating any of these proposals on their merits, lawmakers are attempting to move them all at once under an ultra-expedited process.
The package of cobbled-together bills is a mess, with different age-gating schemes for different services, using different standards. It’s a lot of complexity, and a lot of legal risk. Faced with that, many companies will conclude that the safest option is restrictive age-checking practices across their entire platforms.
Buried inside the KIDS Act are provisions that will push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation policies for online speech, and even create new rules about private and encrypted communications. While supporters continue to claim this bill protects minors online, its requirements come at the expense of privacy, free expression, and the ability of people of all ages to use the internet without revealing sensitive data.
Goodbye Fediverse if this passes, because it’ll surely kill that network. Goodbye FOSS too as that won’t be able to comply the with web DRM that will surely be this law’s enforcement mechanism.
Skimming the bill, it seems at least one of the definitions in it requires that platforms, in order to be covered by it, do this:
Fediverse instances usually don’t do this, so wouldn’t be covered at least by this definition, though I haven’t yet read the bill in detail.
They’ll still be blocked by web DRM if web DRM is this bill’s enforcement mechanism. Google and Cloudflare already laid the foundation for that.
Why couldn’t the Fediverse resist something like this? Doesn’t decentralization help to fight against this?
Splintenet would destroy it, assuming this censorship stuff actually causes a splinternet.
You can probably use an instance outside of the US. But yeah, the internet will change.
Better get used to living in NK, because the whole free world is turning into that. I just contacted my rep, but given the state I live in already age-gated porn sites and no doubt wants to lock down the general web too, it probably won’t amount to much.