California amends controversial bill in the field of information technology
California state officials have begun making amendments to one of the most controversial bills in the field of information technology. This was reported by Zamin.uz.
This decision was made following sharp protests from open-source software developers, operating system communities, and personal data privacy advocates. The revised document proposes exempting the majority of open-source operating systems from the requirement to mandatorily verify users' ages.
If these amendments are officially approved, world-renowned systems such as Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Arch Linux will be exempt from complying with the new rules. According to the initial plans, the responsibility for determining a user's age on internet networks was to be shifted from individual websites and applications directly to the operating system.
Under this regulation, when a computer or mobile device is launched for the first time, the system was required to ask the user for their age and subsequently transmit this information to other applications. However, since Linux-based systems do not belong to large commercial corporations and most are managed by volunteer developers, implementing such a requirement was found to be technically impossible.
International organizations protecting digital rights have strongly condemned this initiative. In their view, controlling users' ages at the system level serves as a dangerous foundation for establishing mass surveillance on the internet.
The revised bill proposes exempting projects operating under licenses that allow the free copying, modification, and distribution of software from these obligations. This is considered a significant victory for the free developer community.
Nevertheless, systems that have their own proprietary app stores and are used for commercial purposes may still remain subject to the law's requirements. For example, although Valve's SteamOS is based on Linux, it is organically linked to a closed commercial marketplace.
Therefore, it is possible that regulatory bodies will evaluate it not as a free operating system, but as a large commercial ecosystem. These legal changes are expected to come into full effect starting January 1, 2027.
