Who's trying to break the internet today?

Oh, it'll all work out in the end, those 16 and 17 year olds will be too tired to surf social media after all those overnight shifts they'll have to pull.

I'd love for one of the politicians pushing this to explain how they're going to enforce this. or give any kind of explaination that shows they know anything about technology or social media and how it works aside from 'i push button and tweet comes out'.

They're going to cut all the tubes that lead to teenagers' phones.

any time some senator says action is being taken for the safety of the kids, they don't actually give a shit about kids.

While I don't really care about this per se, admittedly I have no skin in the game either. From the comments, this seems to be the bill in question:
My concern here is what ELSE this bill might do besides lock a foreign competitor out of the US market(so that the foreign manipulators have to do it through US controlled media and theoretically give them the $$$).

Paladin said:

any time some senator says action is being taken for the safety of the kids, they don't actually give a shit about kids.

Senator Blumenthal Pretends To Fix KOSA; It’s A Lie

As lots of folks are reporting, Senator Richard Blumenthal, this morning, released an updated version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). He and co-author Senator Marsha Blackburn are also crowin…

www.techdirt.com

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Not unlike the Liberal's new online harms bill in Canada. On its face, it's designed to protect children from harmful content online as well as protect people from revenge porn/etc, however that's only a fraction of what's in the bill. It also drastically increases the government's ability to regulate "hateful content" online, leaving the definition of hateful content extremely vague. Vague enough that the wrong (AKA current) government could easily try to abuse this by stifling free expression of political opinions on platforms like Youtube.

It also (in its current form) enables the government to place you under house arrest if someone fears/believes you may post so-called "hateful content" online in the future. Are our Justice Minister has defended that portion of it, promising that it would have to "meet a high threshold" to happen. I'm sorry, but there is no "threshold" for pre-crime. It belongs exclusively in the realm of dictatorships, theocracies and Tom Cruise films.

Trudeau has been taking a pounding and a half lately, despite the efforts of most mainstream media to steer the conversation away from that. The problem is, nobody in Canada gives a damn or trusts the major news networks anymore. Trust of major media outlets in most provinces is down at rock bottom levels. CBC, Global and CTV are all on the take from the government (and it's gotten so much worse after COVID), and most of their "journalists" are just mouthpieces for government policies or opinions. Trudeau has even publicly opined for the good old days when his public only had a small handful of news sources that all parroted the same crap. I'm paraphrasing, of course, but the gist of it is that all the parts of this Online Harms Bill that don't pertain to protecting children is a response to this current situation, and arguably the actual purpose of this bill, with protecting kids being incidental.

That they're trying to use protecting children to shield the rest of this insidious bill from legitimate criticism is truly revolting. This government and its cronies can't be gone soon enough. I don't even know what to call them anymore, but it turns my stomach to call the "Liberals", because I no longer believe that's what they are.

Is anyone surprised that the RESTRICT Act (even the acronym sounds sinister) actually effects a lot more than TikTok?

Direct your emails to Rand Paul's office. Like him or not, if we could get any senator to filibuster this crap it's most likely going to be him.

Is that the same bill they're debating on right now? I just ask because the article you linked is from a year ago. (Though I also wouldn't be surprised if it's way worse now.)

It's not the same one that passed the House, but I don't think it's dead either.

They still consider Cuba an enemy? Stupid old boomers

They consider everyone an enemy.

Net neutrality:

Don't think that counts as breaking the Internet.

No, it's un-breaking it.

I never noticed a difference, but yay I guess.

I think that's largely because the corporations hadn't had time or opportunity to abuse it.

Or because, well, what's the most widely-used site they'd be likely to throttle? YouTube, where, for anyone who's using Firefox, whatever ISPs are doing would be swamped by what Google itself is doing.
(We need laws against browser discrimination too.)

Or, well, this part:

While it’s been almost seven years since the FCC killed the previous net neutrality rules, their reinstatement isn’t expected to noticeably change users’ online experience. Public Knowledge legal director John Bergmayer credits that to several states having passed their own net neutrality measures prior to 2015, all of which remained in force when the FCC reversed course two years later following Trump’s election.

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In hindsight I'm wondering if Net Neutrality was an astroturf movement spearheaded by Big Tech. Think about it: if you ran a major ISP and it was legal to charge different prices to different customers, arbitrarily, whose rates are you going to be jacking up? That's right, the big megacorporations that have tens of billions to throw around. Little mom-and-pop sites like this one aren't worth extorting.