ITWeb contributor Phillip de Wet.
We need, not to use too strong a term, a hero. Someone who can step into a hard job that comes with a toxic legacy because the future demands it.
We need that person (or, preferably, mid-sized organisation) because we’re headed straight towards a set of internet regulations that are as inherently dangerous as they are necessary, without anything near the kind of robust debate that should attract.
Nobody in the world has ever built a wall that teenagers can’t scale if there is pornography on the other side. It is hard to imagine any technology that could ever change that.
But then, kids use drugs. Kids steal cars. We keep trying to stop them, despite the failure rate and the false positives and the annoying impositions on adults from measures designed to protect children against themselves when their parents aren’t watching.
Until pretty recently, there just was no viable way to achieve the protection of children online. Take it from someone who vociferously argued, as recently as 2012, that age verification could not work in South Africa because it was entirely reliant on producing a credit card number.
So, for a long time, the safety of children was a problem you could not address without kneecapping the open web, or at the very least imposing ludicrously draconian measures, often ones that would grant governments the kind of power that imperils democracy.
That equation has changed. At the end of this week, the UK’s online age verification rules will be in force. The US is taking a state-by-state approach. Australia is getting there, Canada is moving in that direction, and the EU will have a full system up and running in the next couple of years.
It’s not going to be perfect, but early indicators are that age verification systems will work quite adequately at scale.
It’s not going to be perfect, but early indicators are that age verification systems will work quite adequately at scale. Banks have proven they can satisfy anti-terrorism requirements by matching a live biometric check against the population register. Machines that guess the age of a user based on a photo are good and cheap and getting better and cheaper.
Sure, there’ll be setbacks as those wall-scaling teenagers find ways to fool the system. There will be outrage as adults are prevented from accessing innocuous content by mistake.
That won’t matter. The existence of fake IDs has never seen any society giving up on the idea of limiting alcohol sales to minors, nor has the edge cases where grownups were denied what they were entitled to.
Sentiment has evolved alongside the technology, to the point where the Internet Service Providers’ Association in February called for “local debate around the growing global issue of age verification on the internet”. That oh-so-guarded approach is still remarkable if you consider the academic and free-speech, and even anti-government, roots of ISPs everywhere.
Parents don’t want to be solely responsible for keeping their children safe. Experts agree on the need to act. Regulators such as the Film and Publications Board are required to protect children. Lawmakers love age verification, whether from genuine concern for children or just because it is such a voter pleaser.
The momentum is unstoppable – to the point where that is about to become the central problem.
Age verification is not only a form of censorship in itself; it relies on a broader system of censorship. It is no good getting the big platforms to look out for children without any means to block the non-compliant and the flat-out evil.
Somebody, somewhere, has to take the contrary stance, to help us guard against over-reach and systems too open to abuse.
That role will come at a price: being branded the champion of letting children watch porn. No matter how carefully they tread, no matter how many caveats they front-load, that characterisation is inevitable.
Pray there is a hero standing by to take up that heavy mantle.
