Within the next week, Congress is preparing to vote on the KIDS Act, a sprawling package of legislation that seeks to control Americans’ web browsing and private messaging. The package includes a revised version of the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, combined with a collection of other internet bills, study bills, reporting requirements, and new regulations. Instead of debating any of these proposals on their merits, lawmakers are attempting to move them all at once under an ultra-expedited process.
The package of cobbled-together bills is a mess, with different age-gating schemes for different services, using different standards. It’s a lot of complexity, and a lot of legal risk. Faced with that, many companies will conclude that the safest option is restrictive age-checking practices across their entire platforms.
Buried inside the KIDS Act are provisions that will push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation policies for online speech, and even create new rules about private and encrypted communications. While supporters continue to claim this bill protects minors online, its requirements come at the expense of privacy, free expression, and the ability of people of all ages to use the internet without revealing sensitive data.
Goodbye Fediverse if this passes, because it'll surely kill that network. Goodbye FOSS too as that won't be able to comply the with web DRM that will surely be this law's enforcement mechanism.
Why couldn't the Fediverse resist something like this? Doesn't decentralization help to fight against this?
Splintenet would destroy it, assuming this censorship stuff actually causes a splinternet.
Someone will definitely make something that combines all the different nets into a usable thing again (like streamio but for the Internet).