> Porn peddlers would probably pinky-promise not to disobey the user-agent and expose the kids to the content (and get them while they're young).
We're talking about a law. If you distribute pornography to someone who sent the header in that request, it would be a violation of the law. But that law doesn't have any ID requirements or privacy problems, unlike the proposed one.
> However, as we have already seen, asking nicely in the HTTP headers doesn't actually work, it may even help porn peddlers better target children.
To begin with, "targeting children" is preposterous. It assumes that they would not only not care but prefer to have children as users than adults, even though children are less likely to have access to money to pay for content/subscriptions and purposely targeting children would get them into trouble even under longstanding existing laws.
On top of that, the header isn't specifying that the user is under 18, it's specifying that the user agent is requesting not to be shown pornography. It's as likely to be set when the user is a 45 year old woman as a 14 year old boy, so using it to distinguish between them wouldn't work anyway.
They would benefit from targeting children because porn is addictive and it is a stronger addiction the younger you start. Building future customers, basic business tactics really.
This is the kind of "business tactic" they used to teach about in DARE rather than business school.
Porn companies don't have any kind of monopoly or brand loyalty and the ones shady enough to do something like that are exactly the ones that won't still be in business by the time today's kids are adults, so anyone doing it wouldn't be the one deriving a benefit from it.
Even normal companies don't care about customers decades from now because the thing they do teach in business school is discount rates. A dollar in 10 years is worth less than half that today. Likewise, managers get bonuses and promotions on the basis of present-day profits rather than something that happens a generation from now when they're likely to be at a different company anyway.
The premise that they're expected to do that on a widespread basis is ridiculous. Instead it will be one fool who writes something along those lines in an email which is then published because media companies love publishing anything which is bad PR for someone they don't like, regardless of whether it was ever widely implemented or implemented at all. It isn't an actual business strategy for real businesses.
Decades? Generation? Make a good argument if you are going to make one. We are talking a few years here, say 12, 14, 16 to 18, and they get a steady customer.
The premise of "steady customer" is that they stick with you. Which, to begin with, is implausible because there are so many competing services, and even if it actually happened and that person subscribed to your service until they're 80 years old, those years are decades away.
Companies think both at a micro and macro scale. They chase individuals but they are also very interested in seeing the entire landscape be more interested in whatever they are selling. If porn peddlers were only targeting "that creepy uncle", and not thinking beyond that, the porn industry would not have been as big as it is today. The financial insentive is very real, and so is the desire to keep porn accessible to kids.
The dichotomy you're implying is "that creepy uncle" on one hand and a large proportion of the population on the other, but it's the latter in both cases. The people between the ages of 14 and 80 are nearly the same number of people as the ones between 18 and 80, and the people between 14 and 17 don't have money to pay you during those years anyway.
Targeting them has a lower return than targeting people who are of age.
This is just being intentionally obtuse. Just looking at simple probabilistic thinking, a porn company is more likely to get more customers if they target teenagers, make porn more normalized, obviously make porn legal, etc. If they have these incentives, then these companies would do them. They are not exactly headed by moralists or ethically inclined people..
Specific to targeting teenagers, porn users are mostly under 30, so your statement about 14-18 being around the same as 18-80 is irrelevant. About not being able to pay at 14-17, sure, let's go with that, but they start paying after that. We are talking a few years here. Companies do have incentives to create customers just a few years down the line.
Let me ask a few rhetorical questions. How do you think social media became popular? How did tiktok, snapchat, facebook, instagram become popular? Even yikyak became popular because they targeted teens. Why has so much advertising been targeted to teenagers for decades now? Hell, how did onlyfans become popular? All these companies have massive incentives to target teenagers.
So your stance of these porn companies not targeting teenagers is just being willfully obtuse.
We're talking about a law. If you distribute pornography to someone who sent the header in that request, it would be a violation of the law. But that law doesn't have any ID requirements or privacy problems, unlike the proposed one.
> However, as we have already seen, asking nicely in the HTTP headers doesn't actually work, it may even help porn peddlers better target children.
To begin with, "targeting children" is preposterous. It assumes that they would not only not care but prefer to have children as users than adults, even though children are less likely to have access to money to pay for content/subscriptions and purposely targeting children would get them into trouble even under longstanding existing laws.
On top of that, the header isn't specifying that the user is under 18, it's specifying that the user agent is requesting not to be shown pornography. It's as likely to be set when the user is a 45 year old woman as a 14 year old boy, so using it to distinguish between them wouldn't work anyway.