There’s a piece going around arguing that governments are breaking the internet in the name of child safety, and that forcing ISPs to ship routers with default family DNS filters would be a far cleaner solution. It’s a reasonable technical argument. The problem is it’s solving for the stated goal, and a lot of people are skeptical that the stated goal is the actual goal.

That scepticism is fair. When a government says “we need age verification on adult websites,” they are also describing a system that requires you to hand over identifying documents to visit legal content. The data gets collected. The data gets stored. The data gets breached, or sold, or handed to another agency under a different justification eighteen months later. We’ve seen this pattern enough times that treating the stated intention as the real one requires a certain generosity of spirit that the evidence doesn’t support.