Complying With Stupid: CA AB1043 Is A Bad Law

*It does bad things, in a bad way, for bad reasons.*

Age verification laws are, in general, bad.

Most things motivated by “will someone think of the children”-style moral panics are bad.

They’re usually poorly thought-out, often by people with no knowledge or expertise in the subject and generally amount to no more than:

someone needs to do something
this is something
make everyone do it

CA AB1043 is all of these things.

The moral panic here is “OMG! The kids are seeing things I don’t like on teh Interwebs!1!”

The solution that seems to be popular everywhere is to make allowing children to see “things I don’t like” illegal, and then requiring every piece of software to report the user’s age to anyone who provides “things on the Internet” so they can be held liable if a child sees something the legislators don’t like.

This is deeply, painfully stupid.

And, in the United States at least, almost always unconstitutional: it imposes a burden on everyone in order to unconstitutionally restrict access to information by a minority group.

It’s all just bad.

And, in general, it just doesn’t work anyway.

It won’t keep kids from seeing videos of naked people, or information about abortion, or evidence that gender is a stupid collection of social stereotypes.

Attempts to keep kids away from sexy topics has never worked.

And that’s a good thing, since kids do grow up into adults and adults need to know about sex. And abortion. And social stereotypes of various kinds.

So, it shouldn’t be done and won’t achieve it’s goals anyway.

But what CA AB1043 adds to this bubbling pot of stupid is a set of requirements on computer systems that:

are trivial to implement,
but don’t actually do anything.

But don’t take my word for it. Go read the actual text of CA AB1043.

Now, find someone who can read the BASH scripting language and have them read this script. It’s quite short; it only has 38 total lines of script in it, and could have been done with way less than that.

Now, I Am Not A Lawyer.

But by my reading of that law, just having that script file somewhere on the disk of most computers would be enough for that system to be fully compliant with CA AB 1043’s requirements.

And that’s just stupid.

CA AB1043 is a bad law.

It does bad things (burdens software developers with stupid compliance obligations) for bad reasons (trying to limit the information available to members of the public) in a bad way (that won’t even achieve anything).

It’s bad, bad, bad.

And the entire California government should feel bad.