yeah this all seems pretty reasonable. its more or less what my parents did for me, but i was before the advent of ipad kids. not every parent can work at ensuring kids spend a limited time on devices, especially when they’re working against adults whose full time jobs it is to cause addictive use.

This forces Chinese internet companies to provide ways to prevent youth digital addiction, unlike in the West where anything goes.

This is a huge one. If the internet wasn’t capitalist and designed to draw kids in and not let them go, a restriction like this would not be needed. We don’t go around restricting kids playing, for example, soccer, because it’s extremely rare that they will get addicted to soccer to the point of jeopardizing their development. Both soccer and the internet are entertainment and recreation, there is no real fundamental difference between them. BUT, in our current capitalistic society, one of those was crafted by marketing professionals and literal psychologists to get kids hooked and keep coming back no matter what. If that wasn’t the case and sites were made to just be fun and entertaining (and safe) without the dark patterns and addictive designs, then the internet is just another form of recreation like soccer, and we don’t need to enforce how much kids use it anymore. In a world like that I imagine kids would also naturally use the internet less, because, again, it would be just another form of recreation out of the many others they have access to, and not something designed occupy every part of their mind.

You don’t like these restrictions? I know I’m not a huge fan purely in principle, then we need to clean up and de-capitalize the internet so it’s safe for kids’ mental development to access whenever they want. Until then, I think limits like this is needed and I support them.

I didn’t know that the youth gaming policy was also opt-out. Everyone in the west omitted that said that it was mandatory, and that seemed pretty over the top. Since both are opt out, this is a very reasonable policy.

IMO it should be. Internet gaming, as in the esports and micro transactions kind, should be restricted to mid or late teens at best because it really does prime your brain for things like gambling. Games that do not have such tendencies, like story or strategy based games that run locally and are not pay to win or have dark patterns, basically like an interactive movie that you play a character in and is actually intended to have artistic or literary value, should be treated differently as they’re more like a futuristic story book than something like Fortnite, but very few modern “popular with the kids” games fall onto that category so it’s kind of moot.