only understand the concept and know where to find a VM.

That’s already smarter than most of my relatives.

I’d argue that controlling / monitoring where a kid goes should already be responsibility of the parent.

If it’s all in the browser then the unprivileged user is at the mercy of whatever rules the installed browser establishes for allowing them access to. So it’s a battle between the parent (helped by the OS) being smarter at setting up local restrictions / monitoring history and the kid being smart enough to break them / act undetected.

I think the idea here would be that the OS would be able to tell the browser (or any app) that the user is only allowed content of a particular target age group, and then the browser (or whichever app) would apply any appropriate restrictions (which could include restricting virtualization primitives like WebVM, other js APIs or even network-level filtering if that’s what it takes).

You can also advocate for making use of the “guest wifi AP” many routers already provide to ensure the access to the internet for their kids is done in an allowlist basis. To the point that the kid would have to be “smart enough” to break through the WPA encryption of the main wifi access point (or find out some other social engineering way to get access to that wifi) in order to have fully free access to the internet and visit websites that allow them to circumvent age restrictions.

I mean, ultimately it can always be worked around… even if you were to add stronger forms of identification, a kid can take the parents card / ID / DNA sample / whatever when they are distracted and verify themselves. If a kid is smart enough to set up a VM like that they are smart enough to deceive adults. Teenagers have been finding easy ways to get to forbidden stuff for centuries.

I’d much prefer if the source of trust is in the local device, in the OS, that is responsibility of the family to control, and not on some remote third party service offered by some organization in who knows where with connections with who knows who. If parents don’t properly limit the local user account of their kids, or restrict access to the places they don’t want, it’s their responsibility. Set up proxies, blockers and lock the OS locally, but don’t mess up the internet for the rest of us.

I don’t think we would be throwing USB-C away completelly, because it even became mandated by law in EU with the goal of trying to slow down the rate at which people generate trash by getting new cables and power bricks for every new generation of connectors.

But I agree that at the very least there should be a clear labeling mandated by consumer protection laws as well… it’s a nightmare and a scenario that opens the door for a lot of scams… this is even made worse by the fact that nowadays you can even have malicious software running inside of the connector of a cable plugged into an extremely capable port without realizing it, messing up with your device even though the only thing you wanted was to charge it.