Appropriation first, policy afterwards

The government has not yet announced what it wants to do in the online child-protection space. There's a member's bill endorsed by Luxon that tries to follow Australia's social media age limits. But the education select committee wound up with much broader recommendations and Stanford's tasked with responding to them. 

What that'll all turn into is anybody's guess. Australian age-gating for social media? Ofcom-style 'let's make everyone do an ID check to look at darn near anything on the internet while sending angry demand letters to American platforms that don't want to comply with UK regs'? Something else?

Whatever it is, the government seems to figure the regulatory regime will cost $8.5 million per year when it's up and running.

The budget includes this new initiative, which gets $6m in the first year rising to $8.5m in each of the last two forecast years: "This initiative provides funding to develop policy and possible regulatory options to improve children’s online safety, subject to future policy and funding decisions."

None of that makes sense if it's an appropriation for developing policy and possible regulation. It's too much money, and it rises over time rather than declining in the out-years when the policy development work is largely done.

And if you look into the Vote Internal Affairs categorisation, well, the thing's classed as regulatory services - not as policy and related services. 

It's far more plausibly an operational allocation for running a new regulatory regime.

One that, as yet, not only has no supporting legislation, but also no hint of what it's meant to be doing. 

My column in Newsroom this week, now ungated, goes through it.

All of this is pretty dumb.

Nobody has yet figured out a way of age-gating social media or potentially sensitive stuff online that doesn't suck. 

New Zealand is unlikely to be the first place to find a way of doing this that doesn't suck. 

The potential harms are real, but often overstated and highly heterogenous. 

There are existing controls that parents can use to gate access for their kids. Some of those controls are undermined by school accounts that parents cannot control. 

The government could be very helpful in providing resource to schools to help parents understand the tools that are available to them, and in helping schools to not undermine their families' choices by setting school accounts whose controls don't mirror those set by parents (or otherwise provide circumvention options on time limits or app limits by logging into the school account on their device or on a school-provided device). 

Anything beyond that, and just enforcing existing law on other bits around grooming etc, should be a watching brief. If somewhere else *does* find a way of my trilemma, great! We could piggyback on their version if voters wanted to do that. We wouldn't have bespoke compliance costs that platforms would be quick to ignore - or to use as basis for just blocking countries that are too small to be this stupid. 

And I just despair when I hear people from industries that have suffered enormous costs from legislation set to 'send a message' regardless of any cost-benefit assessment claiming to support social media bans because they 'send a message'. Crooked timber...