Imagine opening your email or direct messages to find explicit messages about how someone is going to kill or rape you. Or, maybe it’s a message threatening some form of blackmail - like releasing deepfaked nude photos - if you don’t comply with the abuser’s demands. Then imagine the police telling you there’s not much they can do to help you, and even if they do, living with the fear and constant anxiety of knowing there’s nothing much to stop the perpetrator from immediately beginning that pattern of harassment again. Then imagine this harassment escalating into physical violence or self-harm.

Now, imagine this happening to a minor.

Imagine a slope so slippery that god himself could not climb it.

I do agree that harassment online is an issue and has been since long before the first “I fucked your mom” was screeched into an xBox, but there needs to be extremely well defined situations where law enforcement are given access to information about ISP subscribers or users of a particular website.

Any kind of bulk-deanonymizing measures should be avoided at all costs as it undermines one of the most useful feature of the internet. If some one wants to find information on a sensitive topic, for example an embarrassing health issue or seeking help for abuse, not having a way to anonymously do so negates any help they obtain.

Ever since the “dark web” and “VPN” made it into the mainstream media it’s been a ticking clock to the day when each government decides that anonymous communication is intolerable. “Think of the children” is the war cry of malicious politicians and useful idiots alike.

The age verification thing is definitely the concerning part because it is very hand-wavy in this post.

Implement privacy-preserving and trustworthy age verification methods (for example, computer algorithms that ensure reliable age verification) to detect when a user is a minor and to restrict access to any content that is inappropriate for minors to such users while expressly prohibiting the use of a Digital ID for these purposes;

Specifically, the legislation will require operators to act in the best interests of a user whom it knows, or should reasonably know, is a minor by taking reasonable steps in the design and operation of its products and services

The legislation may not require businesses to check your ID, but it may force them to do it anyway in order to protect their own asses, maybe after lawsuits test the “reasonably know” bit.

So we will be able to definitively identify online harassers using “burner accounts”, but we explicitly won’t have a Digital ID. And how would you do that? Are we outlawing VPNs and the Tor network? Are we requiring Canadian citizens to sign up to social media using verified accounts so they can be handed over if abuse occurs? How will they identify if you’re a Canadian and subject to these laws? The same way Texas determines you’re an adult and can view porn?

It is unfortunate that our “democracy” consists of a handful of parties who largely share the same sponsors.