I really don't like how the "protect the children" excuse every neo fascist government is touting to sell their wet dreams of tracking everyone 24/7, still gets debated like it has any validity. Kudos to Japan for having seemingly working child protection laws, but this just doesn't have any relevance to the surveillance machine that's currently being built around us. It's coming even if every child disappeared today. I'd rather see more active discussions around what the next steps are, alternatives to the current web and guides how to set them up for example.

Somehow everyone has forgotten about parental controls that have been apart of consumer grade home routers for years.

Parental controls are there specifically to help parents. These settings allow a parent to block everything online only allowing access to approved lists of websites, generaly done through a whitelist or approved websites.

What is missing at a government level is a "curation effort" of websites, similar to Libraries that classify books by genres and appropriate age levels.

I would propose a government fund where Librarians or similar organizations can start this effort, and make these lists easily accessible within routers for non tech individuals, together with local initiatives and programs for parents that have a interest to learn more.

For power users lists like these already exists curated by public individuals very similar to pihole block lists and whitelists.

This concept would be the most privacy respectful IMO giving parents the most power to parent, while respecting everyone else's privacy online including children.

But somehow we all know this is not about "protecting the children", but really about mass surveillance for the public at all age groups, and yet this topic keeps coming up.

There numerous solutions to addressing child safety online that do not violate personal privacy. This is one example, there are others. Solving the problem when you want to address this specific problem isn’t difficult. But the reality is that all of these measures being pushed are not meant to provide real safety to children, but rather to be able to de-anonymize the internet, so governments can better identify “dissenters” (i.e. people who criticize Israel) and provide higher quality information to AI and online marketing firms.

This doesn't mean Japan is a good place to live in btw.

If it relies on SIM cards that means it doesn't work at all with regular computers or when the device connects over WiFi, right? Seems kinda useless.

Of course, all age verification checks on the Internet are useless regardless but this Japanese method seems extra useless.

Are there any better countries we could use as examples in the future other than one where child porn and beastiality are still legal?