In the continued adventures of billionaires trying to force everyone in to chastity belts1, the government is now mandating platforms implement “age verification APIs.” In the most basic cases these are just simply having a User is-adult flag that the platform can use to send all other age filtering down some pipeline.

The silliest case is systemd patching in a metadata field about a user’s birthdate. This is the absolute minimum for compliance and goes with California’s law without any of the Palantir contract bullshit elsewhere2. People are setting their hair on fire about making freedom forks3 that remove the age checks. Especially funny is people setting their hair on fire expecting the results of enterprise corpoware to “take a stand” against the state by refusing to implement the APIs.

Why do I think this is funny? Because protesting third order approximations of policy is utterly pointless. Maintainers of software are being flamed out for what is ultimately a political decision made by a handful of captured regulators doing what their sponsors tell them to do. People are not targetting deciders4 and applying political pressure. I’ve even had people post at me that “they’re complying with things that aren’t even laws yet, this is how fascism works.”

Well, the whole platform is backed by billionaires who have already bought out the politicians worldwide. It’s basically already law. And you’re not fighting it at the level of people who sign the papers–you’re griefing software dvelopers more or less working on projects in their spare time.

  1. https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings ↩︎

  2. Open Rights Group ↩︎

  3. Liberated SystemD ↩︎

  4. An adjective I’ve long stolen from President George W. Bush: “I’m the decider, and I decide what’s best,” CBS News. ↩︎