Do companies like Netflix have any obligations to obey television broadcast regulations? Or, put another way, do these net based TV services voluntarily conform to broadcast rules about proving the age of their subscribers, just to show good faith in case they get criminally investigated?
Debit/credit cards are not always available to those below a certain age, so that makes a pretty decent de facto proof of age. I'm just imagining what might happen if a young teenager with authoritarian parents discovered they'd been using Bitcoin to access Netflix when they were told it was forbidden. Netflix don't need that problem.
I'd say this might only be a problem in the US or the EU, who are babysitting their citizen with all kinds of consumer protection rules. In the rest of the world, governments will not care much about it. And even if there are laws and the willingness to enforce them, they won't be easily enforceable, because Netflix doesn't reside there.
Besides that other possibilities to verify the age of viewers exist. It's always possible to separately require some kind of age verification. Currently, gift cards do not offer a reliable proof of age either - they can be easily sold to minors in the secondary market. So if Netflix would face strict proof of age requirements they would have been required to introduce age checks already.
And even if you proof that the payee is an adult, it's still possible that the viewers are minors. So any age verification requirements are pretty much pointless.
ya.ya.yo!
Agree to disagree... Legislation like this are there to protect, but people still bypass these restrictions. Kids use their parents credit cards
and some parents do not give a shit. { Regulation do not stop bad parents, it just slows them down } We were all young at one stage and
we found ways to bend the system. In my country the legal age to use alcohol is 18, but kids still drink and even use drugs at parties. The
regulation makes it illegal and punishable, so it is only a deterrent not a permanent solution.