Let's be absolutely clear here: The explosion of people being comfortable coming out as some stripe of LGBTQ+ has everything to do with an open internet where youth were not restricted from finding out about information related to how they felt inside. Instead of being made to feel like strangers in their own skin, with a world telling them that people like them didn't or shouldn't exist, they instead found community and self-love through internet forums and information which allowed them to pursue full, healthy lives as adults.

This "protect the children" malarkey is one more way for the religious groups who oppose LGBTQ+ culture to "protect the children" by restricting access to this kind of information, reducing their ability to find it in their formative years, in the name of protecting them while actually stunting their personal growth.

It extends beyond sexuality as well, although that is the most obvious since many religions are deeply censorious regarding sex.

It also affects subjects like atheism, as the various religious cultures generally do not want people contemplating the idea that there isn't a god, especially not while they're young, they want you long indoctrinated into belief before you can explore different ideas.

Further, when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, everything I knew about drugs was literally old wives tales meant to scare kids away from drugs, and then the internet came around and suddenly there was a boom of actual, verifiable scientific information about drugs so if you wanted to experiment with drugs, you knew what you were getting into. I once had a conversation with a girlfriend who was a bit older than me about her experiences with LSD as a teen, and she admitted that at the time she really didn't understand on any scientific level what was happening or what the nature of hallucination was, she just knew she was having fun and seeing crazy shit.

This is a backdoor to restricting access to important information that youth need to have access to for making healthy decisions for themselves sexually, religiously, and in terms of what substances they put in their bodies.

The birth of the internet gave us a beautiful period where people could grow up with access to accurate, verifiable, worthwhile information that helped them navigate and understand the world they were growing up in and who they were within that world.

This kind of legislation intends to snuff out that openness and accessibility which led to increased openness and acceptance of LGBTQ+, atheism, and safe drug use (including the understanding that some illegal drugs like marijuana and LSD are probably safer than legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco).

The OS angle is huge, and worth picking a fight with, but I haven't seen any coverage over how this goes after developers too.

I think this is an attack on ALL open-source.

These bills are written by people who are clearly or maliciously tech illiterate and don't understand either the terminology or the practical impacts. And of course it's wrapped in 'what about the children?!'

They include definitions like (paraphrasing; not quoting a specific bill, but New York, Colorado and California do this):
- "Application" is any software application that may be run on a user's device -- so ... EVERYTHING.
- "Application Store" is any publicly accessible website or similar service that distributes applications -- so ... also everywhere, such as GitHub or GeoCities.
- "Developer" is a person who writes, creates or maintains an application -- so if you have a github repo, or you've posted a binary or perhaps even a script somewhere recently, you're a developer.

And then require both developers and operating system providers to handshake this age verification data or face financial ruin. I think the original intent or appearance of intent is that the store developer needs to do the handshake. I'm not a lawyer, but I can't imagine these definitions aren't vague enough that they can't be weaponized against basically anything software.

I have a github account, and have contributed to "applications". As I read them, these bills pose a serious threat to me if I continue to do so, as that makes me a "developer" and would need to ensure the things I contribute to are doing age verification -- which I don't want to do.

I think that even outside the surveillance aspect, the chilling effect of devs not publishing applications is the end-goal. Gatekeeping software to the big publishers who have both the capacity to follow the law and the lawyers/pockets to handle a suit. These laws are going to be like the DMCA 1201 language (which had much much more prose wrapped around it and was at least attempting to limit scope), which HAS been weaponized against solo devs trying to make the world better.

I fully expect some suit against multiple github repo owners on Jan 2, 2027.