[OPINION] Canada’s age-verification bill for porn is a slippery slope to a restrictive internet

Looks like it's time for a more self hosted and distributed web.

What's the difference? I use ID verification to buy alcohol and marijuana. They have no idea I'm old enough for sure, they trust the license.

The scenario you describe about using the internet with a regime knowing everything, has been the default in North America for about a decade.

This slippery slope argument is nonsense. There is a problem, and this is the tool we have to attempt to fix it with. Half the people on here seem to want to argue that porn has no negative effects on developing children and teens.

I'm not one to glaze Carney, but for the benefit of factuality - this bill was proposed by a senator, not a Liberal MP under Carney. We'll see whether it goes further.

Afaik this is a senate bill and similar to s210 from last parliament, the NDP voted in favour of that one last session which I'm extremely disappointed about, I recall the NDP being pro privacy in the past, which totally got some of my friends interested in them in the first place.

It's even more disappointing that the liberals were the only party with Nay votes on that one. I realise that wasn't passing this bill but still, unimpressed.

Edit. This showed up earlier too in s203 back a few parliaments ago. Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne is the sponsor on all of these.

I was never excited for Carney

Politicians gonna politician. They will all will be in favour of this kind of citizen tracking because it makes enforcing policy easier, doesn't matter if it is Liberal, Conservative, or NDP.

They will try to ban websites run by anonymous weirdos.

It’s also about scanning everyone’s faces for their databases, and probably to feed Palantir in the end.

For sure, only pure evil motives. Establishment needs to destroy Canada to pillage it. Wrap it up in war on China and Russia. Deliver Canadian slaves to Israel and US oligarchy.

So did I 🥲

Call or write to your MP. Let them know that no one wants this.

Why? We are, and have always been, an economic appendage to the USA.

Lmao we're a half step away from falling into fascism ourselves, no invasion needed.

It's insane that NDP supports this. The minute we flip flop back to voting conservatives into power, anyone who gave up their personal information tied to this kind of stuff....do I really need to explain why it's a bad idea here? Nah.

Criminals? What about politicians, advertisers and law enforcement?

Probably time we just stop using porn streaming sites. This has turned into an addiction similar to social media. We can all go back to tormenting full DVDs, or sending clips back and forth on the dark web.

Anyone with a few braincells working knows that it is all bullshit this crusade against porn “for the kids” .

Normies think "for the kids" is a 100% reasonable excuse to restrict freedoms and install authoritarian policy. That's why it works.

I know it's bullshit, you know it's bullshit. Go convince someone who doesn't understand that it is bullshit.

Developing children should never consume drugs or alcohol.

How i feel about voting in general

I'll take it one step further.

Every second of every politicians life should be publicly available and steamed 24/7 excepting matters of national security.

If they want the kind of power that comes with being a politician then they should have to sacrifice their privacy. If they are public servants they need to be held accountable and serve the public.

I sincerely believe that extreme personal sacrifice for politicians should become the norm, and the only way for us to have a healthy thriving democracy.

The same way you sacrifice many rights when joining the military, or on being incarcerated. Service requires sacrifice. And the notion that politicians should be able to enjoy the same rights and freedoms as the rest of us is a huge part of why corruption can flourish.

But that would be impossible, you know. And we can't just go around controlling what people say and think and consume, you know. Because free speech and such and so forth and so on.

collects lobbyist payment

Yes and no

Call it a nanny state but companies have been abusing kids to help and back with social media which, IMHO is a much, MUCH bigger problem than porn. I'm all for a ban on social media for kids under 18 at least.

I fully agree that we need privacy and a system should be put in place that does t spy on the citizens bu at the same time we do need protections for the citizens

The entire "he who sacrifices privacy for security" is a bad faith argument. Tell that to a 70yo granny who just lost all of her life savings to scammers. Tell that to the 15 year old that just committed suicide due to some social media bullshit. Tell that to the countless teenagers wrestling with anxiety and can't get themselves away from social media anymore because companies refined their algorithms so far that they're addicting as fuck.

That is where governments are supposed to step in. Not everything should be legal or else we should also permit owning weapons grade plutonium. Yes, that is an extreme, but its to show that we need limits and the question is where

Yes, government can be abusive and very much on the wrong side, like with the marijuana prohibition that broke and ended countless lives. Now Europe wants to spy in all chats FFS.

Those are great examples.of bad government control but just because these bad examples exist doesn't meant hat any government control is bad

I would favor an age verification system that is guaranteed anonymous. That shouldn't be too hard to setup if the government gives out codes to the citizens, and they can give independent non profit foundations a list of the codes with only the birthdate. Citizen supplies the anonymous code to website, website requests age at foundation, that's it.

Foundation can't legally reveal to government (or anyone for that matter) what code visited what, and the foundation doesn't know what code is what citizen

It's just a random idea written on the toilet, I'm sure there are better algorithms out there to do this, but the point is that it can be done in a fair, dependable and anonymous way.

We need SOME control, no control just doesn't work.

At least apply the controls to all the big players for starters

They've been pushing this for years now.

I'd rather this type of legislation not even be entertained in Parliament and treated the same way as if someone tried to propose banning oxygen. I'll be writing to my MP tomorrow and I encourage everyone reading this to do the same. If you let them take a centimetre of our privacy, they'll take an entire kilometre.

You think business wont just pick up and move to a part of the world with less regulation?

But what's next, melsaskca, I ask of you?! What if we have to verify our identities to look at cat videos! Things could get dark, you have no idea!

The tech exists and has for decades and is battle hardened. It is called zero proof knowledge but Centralized power wants nothing to do with it as it is a decentralized technology. It is ok, as we will be forced to move towards decentralized services the more we wade into the new AI/Quantum Age as anything Centralized is a sitting duck for being hacked and hacked often to the point that they become useless.

Not to be that guy, but teaching high school students to just plug a random flash drive into their PC probably isn't the best security practice to be imparting...

Maybe a booth teaching them?

You won't need to. Students find ways around content blocks and share it out themselves. Super sketchy free VPNs in mass use, tethering to phones, using ISP-based free wifi access points piggybacking on home connections from neighbours to the school—or, in one case, the school itself, logging in with guest accounts/incognito mode, running random executables from a (frequently virus-infested) Flash drive (aforementioned VPNs, web browser, or P2P web tunnel/Tor), torrenting, DNS swapping, and also old school "sneaker net" sharing contraband files directly. I've seen it all. The worse part is that they, largely, don't know enough about computers to understand what they're doing, so they end up sharing viruses and spyware with each other. Hell, I've told students to stop using their sketchy janky tools and taught them how to find safe/reputable ones (like ProtonVPN) or just use a different DNS to bypass the school filter entirely. They're doing it anyway; at least teach them how to use a condom.

Kids will find a way past the blocks and share it out. Not to access porn—that'll just be a byproduct—they'll do it to chat with friends and play games.

This is a fool's errand. A massive money pit that will inevitably lead to a massive data breach and resulting scandal. And it won't prevent a single teenager from watching porn.

It's ridiculous that this is still being talked about in 2025, let alone being implemented by clueless Boomer politicians around the world. Ask any computers teacher in Canada if their school has ever successfully blocked students from playing games on school computers—even without web access, lol. It doesn't even take a computer expert to know this will never work.

What a pointless waste.