What a deeply troubled time. It's accelerating so fast. All this age verification/surveillance shit is intensifying super fast.

Meanwhile personal computing is being savagely destroyed, as consumer channels to ram and storage disappear.

It's so bad. These people need to be punished. This is so so so unacceptable and the forces for state intrusion into all digital systems and pervasive survelliance have gotten so so so far in the past couple years.

It's a confluence of two things: (i) Canada's government policy community tends to be heavily influenced by legislative trends in the UK/Aus/NZ; this particular one is almost a direct import from the UK's ill-advised Online Safety Act, though worse in some ways, and (ii) a series of Canadian Supreme Court decisions, most notably 2024's Bykovets, which the security intelligence apparatus in Canada feels has totally hamstrung data collection.

Both (i) and (ii) have led the government to this dark place, thinking they're doing good.

Because we've removed the ability for anyone non-evil to succeed politically.

Usually? Money.

There's an exceptional amount of money to be had in creating the new digital feudal state.

Given that most everyday digital technology is in the hands of a few powerful monopolies they feel they have the opportunity to actually pull this off.

I'm doubtful the venn diagram intersection of engineers and the world cup is as big as you think it is.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9q3x19ddl7o is perhaps an unintentionally good summary of this situation.

The legislative process has a check valve. Vote on it until passes, then it can't be undone ever.