This frames the issue in a fundamentally incorrect way.

Since the dawn of pseudoanonymous communication, politicians have been trying to get their nasty little claws into it. See Clipper Chip in the 90's. They've tried many avenues to deanonymize and centralize. Going after the parents is just their latest - they've discovered they could use convincing language like this to trick a bunch of people who previously had no reason to care about The Internet to now suddenly "realize" oh gosh it's scary out there, what can we do to help.

Unfortunately their latest tactic is working. They figured out how to recruit a (possibly) well-intentioned bloc into supporting efforts that undermine privacy in an irreversible way.

> Because of our industry’s refusal to take those concerns seriously, we lost our voice,

Fighting against demands to censor, unmask, and neuter the closest thing we've got to a global platform of freedom is a valiant effort. Not entertaining these bureaucrats isn't some moral failing of our industry, in the same sense that ignoring a persistent busker on the street entitles him to your money after some uninvolved observer has arbitrarily decided he's made the same demand enough that somehow it's starting to make sense because the victim hasn't yelled at him with a good enough argument against it.

In other words: yep, still the parents' job, yep, internet was still there when I grew up, yep, I turned out fine, yep, politicians have been trying to take away our privacy for 30 years (and unfortunately, they're finding more creative and convincing ways to disguise it). Hint: it's never about the kids

I guess, but there's a philosophy that goes something along the lines of: Government is not the answer to every problem. It's a very divisive issue, clearly. Technical people were never going to solve the problem of kids having access to adult materials online because tech people are only interested in making gobs of money, not in dealing with delicate social issues. Government isn't going to fix anything, either, mind you, because the moment the crackdowns begin, the technologists will walk right in with a solution. Maybe we'll finally have the distributed, peer-to-peer network we always thought we were getting but instead got centrally controlled nodes featuring mass surveillance.

I stopped worrying about it as a parent. My kids want to look at porn? Let them. If they want to see horrible, violent shit that gives them nightmares and they can't un-see it, let them. They'll either figure it out or they will be lifetime children looking for big daddy government to solve all their stupid problems for them and society will collapse.

It's still moralist pearl-clutching in service of totalitarian horseshit no matter how you'd like to justify it.

I don't even think you're strictly 100% incorrect here. That said, I refuse to entertain the "think of the children" horseshit when parents happily park their kid in front of an iPad for hours a day because it shuts them up, not with kink content they shouldn't see, but with AI/algorithmically generated garbage, or for that matter, human generated garbage, that rots their brains far more than any gimp costume ever could.

For fucks sake, 12 kids in America die PER DAY due to mass shootings, and we can't even pass common sense gun regulations that the vast majority of gun owners are completely fine with. We don't give a fuck about our kids here. This has from jump, and continues to be, astro-turfed puritan whining not merely to pornography of whatever preferred kind of the moment, but to the existence of queer people as a whole.

It IS parents' fucking responsibility, and maybe that is an onerous burden, but instead of even attempting to meet it, the majority of parents have abdicated it. And it isn't porn fucking their kids up, it's non-stop screen exposure leaving them with no attention span and no ability to simply BE BORED.

  > watching BDSM on their friend’s phones at 12.

Why does a 12 year old have a smartphone that's connected to the internet?

When I was 12 our computer was in the living room and shared by everyone. It could access porn but you had to wait till you were the only one in the home.

There's a pretty simple solution here if you don't already see it and I'm not sure why it isn't more acceptable. It solves all the problems you mention. You don't want kids being sucked into social media? Sucked into porn? Constantly staring at their screens?

Have you ever considered not giving your kids smartphones?

Or have you decided the benefits are worth the costs?

Let's be honest here, even with strong government intervention this is always a cat and mouse game. The play of "no smartphone" is going to be far stronger than anything the government can ever do. Why is this not an option?

The reality is those parents have tried nothing and are all out of ideas, or, in the vast majority of cases, simply don't care.

This is not at all about children by the way, because all millenials have grown while consuming porn and social media, and haven't turned into degenerates. It is 100% an excuse to spy on citizens, and nothing else.

Treating users like adults and allowing them full control over setting system capability and app launch restrictions on devices (and even implementing fully optional, widely blocking restrictions as "parental safety options") was the industry taking it seriously. You considering the freedom of choice to the user as disastrous and the lack of heavily restricted lockdowns by default as "refusal to take concerns seriously" is just a reflection on your attitudes about other people, not any real argument for improving privacy or safety. You ARE a morally panicked maniac if your only grossly offensive things you want to keep pretending are horrifying examples have absolutely nothing to do with the invasion of privacy of children and more to do with puritanical outrage on children accessing adult material.