I mostly talked about this kinda stuff in the moderator forum. Where I put together a legal defense should ofcom come after us. The UK as it stood, only seems to require adiquate protection. This is more complicated worldwide..
I saw a video pop up in my feed about age verification and how it's effecting adult sites. But bare with me on this...
The idea is simple to again protect minor's. Though the jist seems to be a 90%+ drop in traffic as people dont want to put their credit card or other personal information into website which can be classed as a bit iffy at the best of times. The video goes on to basically say the sites can't operate under such restrictions and will likely soon go offline. I won't go into more details, but I can forsee a lot of "unintended consequences" of not good nature which will be on the increase. But not topics we should talk about on this forum.
While we can all argue pros and cons, what I see is again a worrying trend of control. Where again, industry takes the fallout of "simple" requlations. The governments must think, verification by credit card, no problem, you can still get access. But no, it's not that simple.
If you go back to the simple topic of age verification for forums like ours how many people would enter their credit card info to gain access? I suspect regular users many frown upon it but do it. But the vast traffic to the forum are guests. Someone who never heard of this forum will be reluctant to enter their info into a site just to access a bit of content. On that assumption, it would also have a significant fallout to form traffic.
Now please don't misunderstand.. It many not come to that for small forums, at least its not a problem as such currently. But its the matter of control governments have which I constantly see issues with.
For me, like 20-30 years ago. Nothing was really hidden away. There was sites like steakandcheese which was the hub for "all things". Mostly I downloaded funny stuff memes, videos, joke programs etc. Was some fun stuff on there. But it also had a much much darker side. You could get literally any content you wanted on there. Folders you only visited once. Distubing yes. But I find what governments are doing much more worrying and distributing over any content I ever saw online.
A related topic
viewtopic.php?t=7679. Louis Rossman on the erosion of our freedoms.
