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I mean, if you really want to make the government subsidize an ID verification scheme or mandate that certain real-world locations provide age verification as a social service for everyone, that's fine.

It's orthogonal to the discussion, though, which is about whether we should do it or not, because the costs here aren't significant and don't change the terms of the debate.

by fluoridation1 hours ago|

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I'm personally in favor of just banning children off the Internet, but I don't agree it's orthogonal to the discussion. What I replied to was the implication that someone should pay a recurring cost to prove they're an adult for the same reason that they pay to own a computer or to connect to the Internet. Don't disown the dumb thing you said.

by CPLX1 hours ago|

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I'm not disowning it at all. I think paying a recurring cost to prove you're an adult for purposes of accessing the internet is completely fine, trivial, and unimportant.

You have to pay a cost to go out in public, since there are nudity laws. You have to pay a cost to use an airport or a train station. You have to pay a fee to prove that you own a car. And so on.

It just doesn't matter. It's not important. It's consistent with how we organize our society in general, which makes focusing on it in this one particular instance more understandable as an attempt to distract from the substantive merits of these arguments about age verification.

by fluoridation28 minutes ago|

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>I think paying a recurring cost to prove you're an adult for purposes of accessing the internet is completely fine, trivial, and unimportant.

Okay, but the person you replied to doesn't, and instead of providing an actual answer to their question, you posed a false equivalence between proving your age and buying a computer.

>You have to pay a cost to go out in public, since there are nudity laws. You have to pay a cost to use an airport or a train station. You have to pay a fee to prove that you own a car. And so on.

You are purposefully muddying the waters by being lax with your use of language. The "cost" you "pay" by wearing appropriate attire in public is fundamentally different from the actual cost you actually pay when you engage in commerce; one is a trade of freedoms and the other is a trade of goods and/or services. If your argument is that the freedom you have to trade in exchange for the freedom to access the Internet, is that of not having to show an ID, that's one thing. If you also have to add a recurring monetary cost then that's another.

If you don't have an answer to the question of why someone should have to pay again to use the Internet beyond "*shrug* just 'cause, dude. Who cares?", then maybe you shouldn't have said anything.