u/Aurelar

The recent nationwide age verification bill now has the full text published at congress.gov:

https://www.congress.gov/119/bills/hr8250/BILLS-119hr8250ih.pdf

-The bill does not specify how ages for adults are to be verified: it leaves the implementation to the Federal Trade Commission, to be decided at a later date after the passing of the bill. (I was wrong in my earlier post when I thought that the bill would specify ID-based verification: it does not.)

-I am not a lawyer, but I can see a potential loophole for Linux as the law is currently written. The person who controls the operating system can potentially be said to be responsible for age verification on the operating system, not the distribution maintainers, because the administrator of any Linux install has the right to view and change the source code of their install.

All that said, this bill is incredibly short and vague. It could go anywhere from here or be interpreted in many ways. Please contact your representatives. There is a chance the bill might never leave the committee, but we can't simply trust that it will pan out like that.

https://www.badinternetbills.com/

https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative