No it’s not, maybe for some mainstream websites. Saying the “whole internet” is clickbait hyperbole.
Australians will soon be subjected to mandatory age checks across the internet landscape, in what has been described as a huge and unprecedented change.
Search engines are next in line for the same controversial age-assurance technology behind the teen social media ban, and other parts of the internet are likely to follow suit.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-11/age-verification-search-engines/105516256
They mean most of the internet for most people
Only the vast socially relevant parts of the internetelite nerds who use lemmy will be able to circumvent
if the snobs are fine, why care?
those people kvetching about how the endless September ruined everything will have their wish
I think we need to organise a massive campaign for people to cancel their entire Isp for at least a month, I’m betting all this would get reversed almost overnight.
Anything but that I fear they win and we all end up on the darknet.
Hahaha
Good luck doing that.
People can’t even delay their non-essential shinies to make a statement against price gouging/raising bullshit… You think they’re gonna willingly sacrifice something like internet? for a month?
I mean, wouldn’t lemmy qualify as darknet because it isn’t the top 10 websites? We should be growing the Federation anyways so I’m down for that. At least they won’t ban me for making Trump jokes.
No, Darknet is just a website that’s not listed anywhere. Lemmy is listed in many places.
If it doesnt show up on page 2 it doesnt exist lol
I think thats more the deep web than the dark web 😄
Soon there won’t be pages, just AI summarized slop.
Its already like that on certain websites like google. Do these companies think we are all tech illiterate olds?
Not sure about what the norms are where you live, but most people in the US have to sign 1-year agreements for Internet service, and those who don’t typically either pay more or would pay before because they’re on a cheaper, older rate that is grandfathered in and is no longer offered by the Internet service provider.
I pay for mine in cash, they don’t even know my name.
You can do that in the US as well, but it will cost more because you wouldn’t be agreeing to a fixed term. For example, my ISP charges $25 a month for 200 mb/s if you agree to a one-year term, but it’s $40 a month if you do not agree to a one-year term. And there’s also the added inconvenience of having to go to one of the ISP’s physical stores every month and put cash into their kiosk.
They will ask for your name here when signing up, but nothing prevents you from lying about your name if you’re going to be paying in cash. They ask for an e-mail address as well, but you can say you haven’t got one, and they’ll create one for you using their own e-mail service and assign it to you. You don’t actually have to use it, but it is for receiving their bills and notices.
Nah the government would love for nobody to have access to the internet lol
The US government created the internet
Uh huh. People are addicted. I’d bet even the people with petabyte home media systems will go into withdrawal within picoseconds after not being able to get more more more more more more
Better would be to reject sites like reddit. Make them suffer instead.
The real goal is to eliminate anonymity from the internet.
It’s about control. They can grant you access or revoke it based on your id.
The powers at be hate that they can’t control the narrative as well as they used to so this is their solution.
It’s fucking ironic that this article is asking me to register just to read it.
Can was please fucking stop needing accounts to exist online? So fucking dumb
Way Back Machine is your friend. I don’t visit sites directly anymore.
this is backwards. why can’t publishers mark pages as child-friendly and then browsers and operating systems can have a child-friendly mode that parents (or whoever the authoritarians are) can use. Laws can target people misusing the child-friendly mode.
It’s not about actually protecting children. It’s about data.
They’re using children as human shields while they attack our human rights.
The purpose is to protect the mainstream media.
This is the correct answer. Notice that they have no compunction about punishing parents who secure gender-affirming care for their trans kids, but there has been zero discussion of holding parents responsible for their kids’ internet usage.
Far-right groups in the US have been crying “Big Brother” about everything for years because their whole plan has been to create a surveillance state where to gather information about dissenters. Every accusation is a confession with these people.
Remember guys, they cared about the kids and their online safety as soon as Israel started a genocide in Gaza and they lost control of the narrative. But they didn’t care at all for the past 20 years when Epstein and his buddies were running rampant.
edit: clarity
Get your coat, we’re leaving.
Does anyone vaguely remember those internet licenses from that Star Trek DS9 episode when they went back in time but it was the near future from the 80s perspective meaning that it’s actually today?
We’re going to have internet licenses soon
This is why the Dark-web exists.
- Tor
- I2P
- Yggdrasil
- LokiNet
- FreeNet
- ZeroNet
- GNUnet (In the distant future)
Did I miss anything ?
Freenet is now hyphanet, fyi.
No one needs the internet outside of work. The moment I’m forced to show my ID or get my face scanned, I’m done for good.
No one needs the internet outside of work.
As someone with a disability (and no car), the internet has played a massive role in allowing me to live independently, which in turn has a profoundly positive impact on my mental health. There are a wide variety of circumstances in which the internet has enhanced life experience - let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I don’t know what they are thinking, but i protect my ID data more than i protect my credit card data.
If it comes to Lemmy, I quit. I’ll go touch grass all day, I don’t mind.
I don’t see how anybody could come for lemmy. I feel this just attacks centralized services
Lemmy is still very centralized, sure there are many servers and that takes care of the /u/spez problem but very little else, most topic generally have one big community and it’s on the one big server
You can go elsewhere, if you like speaking into the void and nobody even hearing you.
If they threaten server admins with legal action based on the global user count of lemmy rather than their local server user count I’m sure plenty of owners will fold.
Lemmy is probably not complying with UK law already. But if hosted outside the UK you can just ignore them.
Some instances have blocked the UK but you can also just ignore it because wtf are they going to do
I will move to freenet, i2p and tor
Tor was a U.S. government supported service and guess who pulled the plug on it.
Really? I haven’t really used Tor but I can’t find anything about that. What happened?
The Naval Research Laboratory invented onion routing and open sourced the code.
Current US administration stopped funding it as part of their slide towards corporate-driven dystopia, I believe. Tor itself is still out there, just a little more strapped for cash than it used to be.
Using it from time to time and hosting a relay. Works and has been improving over the years imo
Time to buy Death Stranding 2 I guess
If this happens they should check ID at church too seeing as how children are much more likely to be abused or groomed by someone there.
Hell no. Just use decentralized apps, fediverse etc. It’s not about “protecting” children. It’s about full control and power. So don’t give up.
All it takes is one snapshot of legislator’s IDs put online to poke a hole into this balloon.
Also apps that don’t need servers. Switched to this for staying in touch with family p2p, works surprisingly well https://keet.io/
deleted by creator
Got this response from one of the developers:
Looks like a routing issue, it works when navigated to from the index page without a full reload.
Its a server configuration issue. If you have a SPA even server side frameworks that uses native paths you need to configure the server to send all requests to the main application. You’ll find documentation of how to do this in the setup for every framework I’ve run into.
Do they publish their protocol or how it works anywhere? Their site didn’t seem to have much technical info at first glance
It’s about the information vacuum. Now every service will get your ID or photo, giving them both age and a whole sort of other metrics to build a profile on you. And yes, Lemmy.ca doesn’t know that about me.
Yeah so what could possibly go wrong when every site you want to use has your ID and passport etc.
I gotta be honest I thought I’d never be able to quit Reddit. But it was a lot easier when I just did it. If this shit becomes the norm, I’ll back out of a site first time they try that shit and block the site. Maybe I’ll just have to stop using the internet. Wouldn’t that be a net positive on my life. You made me do this, capitalism.
You made me do this, capitalism.
This is a problem with Government not an economic system. It’s about control, not dollars, pounds, or yuan.
But this scene was set by capitalism. The family friendly, market friendly internet is the basis for this entire issue. Yeah, government is the one finally pulling the trigger on sanctioned, total control, but we’ve been surveilled and profiled and censored for decades at this point by countless corporations for ad dollars. We’ve gone through the cycles of outrage and acquiescence and outrage and acquiescence as things have gotten worse and worse—same goes for the quality of politician, all bought and paid for by telecom companies neutering everything we can do to make the market and internet more favorable while the politicians got worse and worse and we began accepting it and just laughing it off.
And here we are. Don’t be fooled, this is 100% at the feet of capitalism.
Yeah “family friendly” = advertisable.
Capitalism runs on top of government. Governments create and enforce the notion that a human, or a fictional human with fractional ownership (corporation), can in turn own arbitrarily large and important objects.
This is often done at the behest of said arbitrarily-large-and-important-thing-owners, who also come up with other similarly terrible ideas to have the government do.
Sure but it would be trivial for a company to build profiles on people using public apps like Lemmy.
But not necessarily link it to your other accounts or real identity, which is the point.
Unless you are one of the extreme privacy people, like deep into freakaziod territory, the folks who build tracking / id systems would maybe need an afternoon to go from your Lemmy username to your home address and underwear size.
For my account sure. I use the same username most places. But it’s also reasonable to have a fairly decent Lemmy account that’s decoupled from all your other online accounts. Use a temp email provider, VPN, and proper browser and you’re most of the way there.
There is a lot of information in the way you type and the topics you choose to discuss. More than we suspect.
If it was so trivial why would they even bother making everyone show their IDs?
Not a static target. What we consider a profile today is vastly more comprehensive than what was deemed sufficient a few decades ago. Ad networks today would put intelligence agencies back then to shame. They can always get more info. Adding biometric face data is useful to them. In a few more decades people might be talking about if Google and governments should be allowed to read your thoughts. The tech making this possible is already being developed and further along than many might expect.
decentralized apps, fediverse
Those apps and / or the fediverse itself would get sued into the ground and shut down one app or server at a time. There’s nothing stopping any Governments authorities from going after servers inside their borders and there’s nothing stopping them from “harmonizing” identity verification restrictions among other countries. They’ve already done it once with Intellectual Property law.
This push to de-anonymize the Internet isn’t new either. Microsoft started this back in the oughts with their Passport / Digital-ID program. Google and Meta, along with others, long ago launched their own versions and it’s why you can sign into so many websites with a Google or Facebook account.
It’s generally referred to as IdP and now that the Internet has been fully corporatized, with minor holdouts, you can bet your bippy that the days of anonymous access are ending.
If only there was a non-commercial, decentralized way of doing the same thing we are already doing. Perhaps make it free too. Hmmm
You’d need to decentralize the Internet itself. Good luck with that one…
What do you mean by that? Most of the infrastructure that makes up the internet is owned by like 6 companies.
I2p exists
So do a million different forms of encryption. That doesn’t make the infrastructure any less centralized. If the people who own the fiber decide to only allow pre-approved types of traffic to cross their networks then it doesn’t make any difference what sort of protocols exist. Building free cross-country or subsea fiber routes is not economically viable and the internet doesn’t exist without them.
That’s a very different story than requiring I’d for some websites
No it isn’t. Either traffic is allowed to flow freely or it isn’t. Once you start down the “isn’t” path there’s not much that can be done to get around the fact that a few people control a huge chunk of the infrastructure.
Please look into how i2p works. It’s not just some form of encryption.
Please explain how you can bypass carrier enforced traffic shaping policy.
From geti2p.net:
I2P’s protocols are efficient on most platforms, including cell phones, and secure for most threat models. However, there are several areas which require further improvement to meet the needs of those facing powerful state-sponsored adversaries, and to meet the threats of continued cryptographic advances and ever-increasing computing power.
The people involved in the project you’re referring to acknowledge that governments can, by influencing carrier policy, disrupt and subvert the project’s intended function. Why then are you implying they are incorrect?
Last time I checked, the p!rate bay still exists. In fact there are many of them. Because the website itself is open source. The same could be done with any other site. If one gets taken down, two more pop up in it’s place.
While true, most sites do not have the fame of the pirate bay and will not see anywhere near the same number of fans hosting remakes, even if the source is available.
