Did Meta spend around 60Mn lobbying for age verification to be forcibly added to every OS install ?
If not, who has been paying to lobby for these age verification laws ?
That seems a question that we should have an answer to.
Forcing an age check upon linux install seems anti-competitive, and a violation of freedom of speech allowed by the Constitution.
Also impractical and ineffective, unless they plan on some sort of bio-metric confirmation of age.
Will they outlaw computation itself, or constrain a personal quota so that only corporations can access approved LLMs and certainly not run a local AGI ?
As with the insane "encryption is a weapon and cant be exported" policy of the 80s, this will surely force innovation to migrate outside the US.
> Did Meta spend around 60Mn lobbying for age verification to be forcibly added to every OS install ?
Of course they would want this -- as long as the OS reports that the user is over 18 via such a system, then Meta is legally off the hook for any COPPA violations.
> As with the insane "encryption is a weapon and cant be exported" policy of the 80s, this will surely force innovation to migrate outside the US.
Not advocating for this policy but if a critical argument against it is that policymakers can expect an analogous amount of computer innovation migrating out of the US as it saw in the 80s, then I think policymakers won't care remotely. Quite literally I think the lower bound for the proportion of global computer innovation happening in the US is 70%.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised. They are absolutely negative player. But I'm kinda confused how this could even pass and what is the functional reason for this? Because "think about the children" it absolutely isn't.
You can of course chain child to the radiator and let him out but that's obviously not an protection.
I have no idea if Meta is driving these, but the only way it would make sense for them to do it is if they saw age-verification as inevitable and would prefer to pass on the costs/liability of implementation to the app store providers. If they didn't see them as inevitable, then it makes no sense for them to be pushing for these as they are fundamentally against their own growth.
I would also encourage taking a critical look at the underlying investigation as it seems mostly LLM generated without a huge amount of manual due dilligence
I also submitted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47370954 because it was pointed out to me that a Reddit submission about the same story on r/linux had been taken down. If there was LLM content I suppose that might at least partially explain a moderator decision there... ?
No, the mods did not make a decision. It got flagged by an auto moderator bot, because of mass flagging. The mass flagging seems to be a brigade that happened on prior posts in that same subreddit discussing this topic of age verification. I don’t have any definite evidence, but it seems odd that a topic that is so relevant to that community would be flagged, so I assume it is a coordinated attack.
I’ve moderated on Reddit before - a mass report bot on r/linux specifically for age verification is too strangely niche. Also automod doesn’t remove flagged posts, unless it has been set up to do it.
It’s also very definitely ai generated, and makes several claims and implication. Users may have reported it as well.
I would hesitate to assume coordinated behavior at this stage.
Maybe it’s a dupe but I think it’s an important topic to discuss. And even if it is mostly LLM generated, that doesn’t mean it is completely invalid. Some of the major points around Meta’s lobbying, and Anthropic’s donations, are seemingly valid.
Which was previously the submitted url on this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362528 (Reddit appears to have briefly removed the post, so then the HN submission was updated)
If not, who has been paying to lobby for these age verification laws ?
That seems a question that we should have an answer to.
Forcing an age check upon linux install seems anti-competitive, and a violation of freedom of speech allowed by the Constitution.
Also impractical and ineffective, unless they plan on some sort of bio-metric confirmation of age.
Will they outlaw computation itself, or constrain a personal quota so that only corporations can access approved LLMs and certainly not run a local AGI ?
As with the insane "encryption is a weapon and cant be exported" policy of the 80s, this will surely force innovation to migrate outside the US.
Of course they would want this -- as long as the OS reports that the user is over 18 via such a system, then Meta is legally off the hook for any COPPA violations.
Not advocating for this policy but if a critical argument against it is that policymakers can expect an analogous amount of computer innovation migrating out of the US as it saw in the 80s, then I think policymakers won't care remotely. Quite literally I think the lower bound for the proportion of global computer innovation happening in the US is 70%.
However this is the kind of investigation that Reddit is famous for, which ends up causing more harm than good, like the Boston bombing investigation.
Age verification, for example, is coming no matter what - there’s a big enough chunk of voters tired of tech globally.
Governments are also tired of dealing with tech and want to bring them to heel.
These macro forces are far more significant than the amounts identified on lobbying in this investigation (~$63 mn iirc)
Given the title, the reading of the article implies Meta is driving age verification.
The content of the investigation, reads more as meta taking advantage of the push for age verification to move it to the OS layers.
I would also encourage taking a critical look at the underlying investigation as it seems mostly LLM generated without a huge amount of manual due dilligence
It’s also very definitely ai generated, and makes several claims and implication. Users may have reported it as well.
I would hesitate to assume coordinated behavior at this stage.