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I guess I'm more surprised by the intensity of the backlash this generates here. I agree with you that mandating (weak) OS APIs like this the right approach, but that alone wouldn't warrant the severe reaction this is getting right?
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A big chunk of the problem with this kind of legislation for me is that it inherently indicates a failure to govern to me. I disagree with the premise of the solution, but even more so this is trying to legislate a specific engineering solution for our current systems rather than any form of financial, objective guidance, or have reasonably actionable and enforceable consequences.

While laws that target engineering decisions are sometimes reasonable, they are always accompanied with specific guidance from a credible academic based institution (e.g. mechanical and civil engineering use private licensing bodies and develop specific curriculum and best practices).

The only time this law will ever be enforced is punitively for other crimes against major actors who are extremely limited in number. It is unenforceable for Linux, trivial for Apple, Microsoft, and Google to add to their OS. Presumably easy to spoof, the law describes it as minimal but once again, there isn't a specification so who knows. Websites won't be liable, they're getting a sweetheart deal here.

In practice what this law does is absolve abusive platforms an from any responsibility. It adds extra meaningless work and overhead for legitimate adult platforms while opening themselves up to new potential legal challenges, and ultimately doesn't replace the responsibility its removing.

This doesn't make children safer. This doesn't make the internet safer. This kind of legislation makes it easier to abuse children online by removing responsibility from platforms that are known to be dangerous to them yet profit from their presence the most.

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It's considered offensive to the strongly freedom-loving FOSS community, and it's basically legally-required tech debt, which is annoying to all maintainers
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Code is speech. Open source projects are an exercise in speaking publicly. This law mandates particular speech in your otherwise Free as in freedom code.

How are you not outraged? People are missing the above forest for the "oh but it's a tiny little easy API and I don't see any downsides" trees.

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Seems pretty reasonable to get annoyed at a law that at best will be useless and at worse dangerous, while it will directly dictate features into the tools we all use everyday. All for no gain for anyone but maybe Meta and some other big companies.
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