USA KOSA Bill
 

This is a very important topic that could affect the future of this site.

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) would censor the internet and would make government officials the arbiters of what young people can see online. It will likely lead to age verification, handing more power, and private data, to third-party identity verification companies like Clear or ID.me.

The government should not have the power to decide what topics are "safe" online for young people, and to force services to remove and block access to anything that might be considered unsafe for children. This isn’t safety—it’s censorship.

See the below link for more information and how to contact your representative, if you are in the US of course.

https://act.eff.org/action/tell-cong...on-t-help-kids

what are the implications of this thing going through for AnimeOTK as a website ?

and what % of the website members are from the USA/would get affected by this thing ?

I can tell you now I am in the UK And if you use VPN like Nord VPN You can bypass it

What it would recommend Is

but maybe a Dare I say it is tor clone site link or move the site host to Canada

There is the possibility that all porn websites will be required to verify user's ages through their identity.

I don't know, man. If I want to buy a porn magazine IRL, the shop clerk has to verify I'm an adult. Sounds reasonable to me.

a shop provides a service and an item and that item isnt really subject to anything past that.. whereas what the government are proposing is far more reaching.. years ago a whistleblower sounded the alarm at how much the US was spying on its citizens what this new law proposes is censorship which lm sure will have a data catching aspect to it, at a shop you pay cash but how do you prove your age? likely with CC information which will be retained, and considering how much the US loves capitalism that information will likely pass hands.


then there is the aspect that with a censorship system in place that it wont just be used on porn but used to keep access away from other things, like abortion for instance.. information could be censored or what about information that was detrimental to say one of your representatives they could hide that as well.. now granted thats speculation on my part but do you trust your representatives to not make use of a system to keep information from you?

A little late of a reply on my end, but one of the other concerns if this passes is that, as a CYA thing, ISPs may just outright start preventing access to adult or otherwise "questionable" websites regardless of age verification process in order to just make sure no minors find a way around the system and result in some ignorant and angry parent (or worse, government official) suing them.

Using VPNs is already kind of a grey area, and I can also imagine a world where ISPs in the US will just block any traffic detected going through a VPN as a blanket effort at preventing circumventing any policies out in place by this law.

A site that primarily gets traffic from the US suddenly losing a huge number of it's visitors because people don't want to just throw their increasingly compromised personal information out there? Suddenly the server costs stop being worth maintaining and these sites you might enjoy start shutting down.

And then, of course, what happens if more benign information and sites start getting restricted or banned by ISPs and government officials in the name of "protecting" kids? Man, that Wikipedia site sure has a lot of adult topics on it. Maybe they need to start being regulated or blocked. After all: how many of us spankos got to feed our interest at a young age looking up the word in a dictionary or fantasizing over scenes from old books, TV shows, and movies? (Just look at the number of animated scenes we have here for download from otherwise non-pornographic sources).

That's always been the dangerous thing about these various "internet safety bills" that come up: They make reasonable arguments as to why people should give up some of their rights that end up have massive long reaching consequences in the name of "but think of the children!"

EDIT: Just as a follow up thought, there are some... let's call them "extremely conservative" figures in high positions of political power and influence in the US who have expressly stated their intent to push for the full scale ban and criminalization of pornography, it's production, and it's distribution within the country should... let's call them their "candidate of choice" win the upcoming presidential election.

So the concerns expressed in this thread are not me and others making a slippery slope argument out of panic or speculation - there's a legitimate and active threat of this stuff coming to pass in the US right now.

wouldn't this get challenged under the first amendment? I'm no law person in any capacity but I remember similar bills getting shot down after being challenged under the first amendment, as Art of any kind that isn't totally and completely kiddy porn is technically protected under the first amendment?

to be honest l dont think any politician isnt frothing at the mouth to have some kind of system in place that can feasibly used for censorship..

It's not about limiting people's access to any specific kind of porn. It's about using the guise of limiting access to minors to actually remove all anonymity from the internet. So you wouldn't be able to use sites like these completely anonymously anymore. I believe our fetishes should be as public or private as we want them to be.

Also, under US law, anything that a jury would find "obsene" could be punishable by jail time. It's a ridiculously scary thin line.