Way back at the dawn of recorded history, the fight over the Communications Decency Act -- the last time we had a moral panic over the Internet, this one about the nefarious threat of "cyberporn" -- was one of the first legal cases I followed from start to finish, ironically because I had access to the internet and could find the actual court information instead of having to wait for my library to get the published decisions. It was extremely formative for my thoughts on the internet! I will be the first to admit that the way the internet turned out today is not what we all envisioned or hoped for in 1996, but that's part of why we're so stubborn about keeping a corner of the independent, non-surveillance-capitalism, text-based slow-paced internet alive over here. (If I ever get that time machine, though, I'm totally using it to go back and create a company that beats PayPal to market with a payment system, though, because if I can stop PayPal, there's so many positive downstream effects. As a fun game sometimes, go search up the Wikipedia article for "PayPal mafia" sometime and see how many names on the list either are either personally responsible for the current state of the internet, or funded the people who are with money they made from PayPal.)

Anyway, yeah, I am never going to stop fighting for your right to use this site without giving me your government ID, because I very much do not want it! I do not want to have to figure out which person is actually this user's parent with legal decision making authority! I do not want to track how much time each person spends on the site daily! It's so weird how all these so called "data privacy" laws would require me to collect a whole lot more data than we ever want to collect, isn't it? People are just regularly baffled by how little we know about all of you, and we like it that way, because what we don't collect can never be subpoenaed.