Think of the children: How to force real ID for all internet traffic (2023)

Most of the useful discussion landed on two points. First, people broadly accepted the premise that centralized age checks create a durable surveillance and liability machine. Once you normalize proving who you are to reach ordinary sites, companies, regulators, and vendors all get incentives to widen the requirement. Several comments pointed to the same pattern in adjacent systems like KYC, AML, DMCA over-compliance, and platform self-censorship. The fear was less "this law targets porn" than "this builds the rails for general-purpose permissioned internet access." Second, commenters were blunt that there is no clean technical escape hatch if the state really wants identity-bound traffic. Mesh networks, radio links, VPN overlays, steganography, and encrypted messaging all came up, but the stronger view was that these are at best niche evasions. Power follows politics. If a workaround starts to matter, authorities can regulate spectrum, app distribution, device trust chains, hosting, or payments, and can use metadata even when content is encrypted. That did not stop people from naming practical tools like Reticulum, Tinc, IPsec, Signal-style messaging, or local parental filtering, but the thread treated those as tactical mitigations, not a strategy. Where the conversation got more grounded was around implementation tradeoffs. The proposed RTA-header approach appealed because it keeps sensitive data in the home and avoids building giant honeypots of IDs. But people also noted its limits. It only works if device makers and software vendors actually honor the labels, if parents lock down devices, and if lawmakers resist the obvious next step of mandating approved operating systems and signed apps. That is why the thread kept circling back to the same conclusion: the immediate technical question is how to minimize data collection, but the real fight is over whether internet access becomes a licensed activity enforced by platforms and vendors.