That is why we should stop relying on email as a login or account recovery method and move to a fully passkey-based system (or something similar), where providing an email address becomes optional rather than a requirement for registration.
At the same time, direct communications between individuals or businesses, especially those that still rely on legacy, letter-like mechanisms, should also evolve. We need a new standard, similar in spirit to what Signal has achieved for instant messaging, but designed for more formal and authenticated communications.
If a system keeps getting abused to grant monopolies on absurdly broad concepts, maybe the problem isn’t just bad decisions, maybe the incentives themselves are broken.
And in practice, litigation costs alone already scare away competitors long before courts decide anything.
Your proposal is definitely less bad than the current system, but it still assumes innovation needs a government referee deciding who gets exclusivity, for how long, and when taxpayers should compensate private research.
That’s the part I can’t get behind.
If the product is not commercially viable without monopoly protection or public reimbursement, maybe the business model is the issue. And if the government reimburses the company, that just means society absorbs the risk while the company keeps the upside.
Who decides the reimbursement amount? Who pays for failed research? Taxpayers? Competing companies? Consumers?
Private companies should be rewarded by the market when they create value, not guaranteed protection from competition and then reimbursed when the state decides the invention is important.
Shorter patents reduce the damage, but they don’t remove the contradiction: a “limited monopoly” is still a monopoly.
I “take” your idea and execute it better than you, there shouldn’t be legislation stopping me
THANK YOU. Exactly.
Competition is supposed to decide who wins, not the state.
If your invention is genuinely great, you should dominate because you innovate faster, manufacture better, support customers better, reduce costs better, and improve continuously, not because the government threatens competitors for 20 years.
That honestly makes patents even less justifiable.
You’re not protecting a finished product or a brand reputation, you’re protecting a method, meaning you’re legally blocking alternative implementations around a problem space.
That’s exactly the kind of artificial restriction that slows competition and incremental innovation.
That argument proves the problem is scale and market power, not lack of patents.
Giving everyone a legal weapon sounds fair in theory, but in practice the biggest companies have the best lawyers, the biggest patent portfolios, and the most money to litigate. Patents often become a moat for incumbents, not a shield for small inventors.
A pro-market answer would be: reduce barriers to entry, punish fraud, enforce contracts, maybe protect trade secrets narrowly, but don’t ban competitors from building better versions.
I’m not anti-profit. I’m anti state-granted monopoly.
If you invented it first, you already have advantages: expertise, brand, speed, know-how, first-mover position, customer trust. Profit should come from executing better, not from getting the state to forbid competitors from improving on your idea.
Patents are not capitalism; they are government-enforced market exclusion.
We need to stop using Reddit, WhatsApp, and YouTube... but we can't.
That's the real problem. These platforms stopped being “apps” a long time ago. They're infrastructure now. Reddit is search results, tech support, product reviews, niche communities. WhatsApp is family, work, school, doctors, landlords. YouTube is tutorials, education, news clips, repairs, entertainment, background noise.
You can quit a bad product. You can't easily quit a social standard.
And that’s exactly why they get away with so much. The cost of leaving isn’t just losing features; it’s losing access to people, knowledge, and convenience. Alternatives exist, but the network effect keeps dragging everyone back.
So yeah, we should stop using them. But realistically, the better first step is reducing dependence: use RSS, forums, Signal, PeerTube/Invidious, proper documentation, personal websites, mailing lists, and local backups wherever possible.
Not because purity is achievable, but because total dependence is dangerous.
I don’t think it’s entirely a separate issue, because how a law is enforced is part of evaluating whether it makes sense in practice.
If a law can only be enforced by treating everyone as a minor until proven otherwise, that’s a strong signal that the law, or at least its scope, may be flawed.
I think the disagreement comes from treating “we have laws” as automatically meaning “we must enforce them everywhere at any cost.” The method matters. This approach flips the burden of proof by treating everyone as a minor unless they prove otherwise. That is a pretty extreme shift from how things normally work in the real world.
We also shouldn’t pretend this actually solves the problem. Kids got access to adult magazines before, and they will get access now through a parent’s phone, shared devices, or older friends. If that’s the target, this kind of system is mostly symbolic while adding friction and control for everyone else.
And more importantly, it normalizes something much bigger. Once you accept that accessing legal content requires proving attributes through some approved system, it becomes very easy to expand that logic. Today it’s age. Tomorrow it can be anything else.
So I don’t see this as a balanced compromise. It’s a disproportionate response to an enforcement gap, with long-term consequences that go way beyond the original problem.
I get why this sounds better than websites directly collecting IDs, but I think it still understates the problem. Even if the site only sees “18+”, the system still begins with strong identity proofing somewhere upstream. So this is not really anonymous access, it is identity-based access with a privacy layer on top.
The bigger issue is centralization. You still need trusted issuers, approved apps, approved standards, and authorities deciding who can participate. That means users are being asked to trust a centralized framework not to expand, not to abuse its power, and not to fail. History gives us no reason to be relaxed about that.
I am also skeptical of the privacy promises. These systems are always presented in their ideal form, but real-world implementations involve metadata, logging, renewal, compliance rules, vendors, and future policy changes. “The website does not know who you are” is only one small part of the privacy question.
So even in the best-case version, this is still dangerous because it normalizes the idea that access to lawful online content should depend on credentials issued inside a centrally governed identity ecosystem. Today it is age verification. Tomorrow it is broader permissioned access to the internet. That is why I do not see this as a decent compromise, but as infrastructure for future control.
That is why we should stop relying on email as a login or account recovery method and move to a fully passkey-based system (or something similar), where providing an email address becomes optional rather than a requirement for registration.
At the same time, direct communications between individuals or businesses, especially those that still rely on legacy, letter-like mechanisms, should also evolve. We need a new standard, similar in spirit to what Signal has achieved for instant messaging, but designed for more formal and authenticated communications.