We’ve talked about the various age verification laws in the United States, and there’s been a development recently that a lot of people seem to think is a good thing: both the age verification laws in California and Colorado have received exemptions for open source operating systems. I fail to see how this is a good thing, and luckily, I don’t even have to explain why because Liam Squires-Hand from GamingOnLinux already did it for me.
When all these laws get stamped and approved, what happens when you run an operating system (let’s say Fedora or Ubuntu) and some web service or application is forced to do age checking and verification (or they face massive fines). Unless Linux distributions / desktop environments do end up implementing something that correctly adheres to these laws, what do you think will happen? Those services / apps could very likely just entirely block Linux in certain regions – or even all regions if it’s Linux to prevent any issues for them.
↫ Liam Squires-Hand at GamingOnLinux
That’s the core of it, right there. These nebulous exemptions are not solutions; they’re barely even band-aids. Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android will implement whatever fascist anti-privacy age-verification nonsense governments can come up with, and virtually all services and applications that need to implement support for it will just follow along as well. Do you really think they’re going to craft exceptions for the few percent of their users running Linux? The past three decades of computing history has made it very clear that no, they will not.
But the exceptions have already achieved their goal: the Linux world is happy and lulled right back into a sense of complacency. What could possibly go wrong?
Without getting into the pros and cons of the laws themselves… That’s a separate debate.
Having an exception will be exactly what is used to circumvent the restrictions. Take the UKs recent introduction of age verification on adult websites. The effect? A reported 1800% increase in NordVPN subscriptions (and yes, it’s that many 0s!)
Honestly, I thought something like a hypervisor was going to be the way round it but seems it might be Linux as a whole might be (until it’s banned and people switch to Haiku)
I think the approach of blocking Linux would be more harmful for them than it would be for Linux end users. History has shown you can’t really fight against Linux. If you don’t embrace it, you’re alienating a growing part of your customer base. Maybe it will take time for businesses to realise that, yet again, but I’d hope not.