We’ve had an answer since the Internet was created: don’t let kids have unsupervised access to it.

I’m very much against this bill, I don’t even think it will help kids any, but lets admit that this is very much easier said than done. If we really mean to be honest, this is just something we say to mean “it’s not our problem, don’t bother us with it”. But it’s not a solved problem, even remotely.

Assuming a moderately tech savvy parent, which is not a given, there are so many alternate ways to access sketchy content, and supposedly child-friendly platforms are so poorly moderated that very few parents can truly manage to control what their kids see. Even YouTube Kids and Roblox are full of stuff that shouldn’t be there.

Then there’s the matter of longer and longer shifts that parents face today, and consequently the diminishing time they have to watch over their children. We also went from wired internet and a single shared household computer to everyone having smartphones and Wi-Fi in every corner. A parent can do everything right and their kid might still end up exposed to inappropriate content by their friend during recess because their parents didn’t bother with any of it.

I don’t want the internet to be child-proofed or that this is used as an excuse for government overreach, but I don’t envy parents who need to deal with this matter today.