Carl Richell has watched his child look up jellyfish lifespans, confidently correct a skeptical parent, and learn about Turritopsis dohrnii, an apparently immortal species.
That’s the internet working as it should. A new wave of state legislation, Richell argues, threatens to close that door.
The System76 CEO last week pushed back against age verification laws in New York, California, and Colorado that would impose identity requirements at the operating system level.
Richell runs System76, which builds Linux hardware and develops the Pop!_OS distribution, making these laws directly relevant to his business.
Reclaim Your Digital Freedom.
Get unfiltered coverage of surveillance, censorship, and the technology threatening your civil liberties.
“We are accustomed to adding operating system features to comply with laws,” Richell wrote. “We are a part of this world, and we believe in the rule of law. We still hope these laws will be recognized for the folly they are and removed from the books or found unconstitutional.”
Colorado’s Senate Bill 26-051 and California’s Assembly Bill 1043 work the same way: operating systems must report age brackets to app stores and websites. Account creation becomes an adult activity. Anyone under 18, under this framework, isn’t supposed to set up their own computer account.
New York’s Senate Bill S8102A goes further. It covers any internet-connected device with an app ecosystem, including exercise bikes, smartwatches, and cars. Adults would need to prove their age to use them. Self-reporting isn’t permitted. The bill hands the Attorney General authority to define what verification methods are acceptable, which in many cases would mean handing personal information to a third party just to turn on a computer.
“Privacy disappears,” Richell warned.
The New York bill is obviously written by people with little technical knowledge and creates another problem it probably didn’t intend. Because Linux is freely distributed and anyone can install it, the bill’s language could technically make the person who downloads a Linux distribution the “device manufacturer,” responsible for providing compliant software.
Richell notes that this kind of provision is rarely enforced in practice, but it shows how laws drafted for the closed ecosystems of iOS and Android fall apart when applied to open computing.
Richell recounts a scene from a recent trip to Mexico where his under-13 child, watching an adult’s request get refused by ChatGPT, solved the problem in seconds through a workaround that required no technical sophistication, just creativity. The story illustrates what Richell sees as an axiom: kids find ways around restrictions.
A parent who sets up a child account and applies restrictions, Richell writes, hasn’t actually locked anything down. “The child can install a virtual machine, create an account on the virtual machine, and set the age to 18 or over.” Or reinstall the OS entirely and say nothing. Laws that push children toward workarounds also push them toward habits that circumvent oversight rather than build judgment.
Richell’s concern with New York’s bill is about what mandatory identity verification at the operating system level does to everyone.
The computer, in his framing, is foundational technology, the one that accelerates everything else. Most of System76’s employees, he notes, installed operating systems and wrote software as children. Restricting young people’s ability to experiment with computers restricts what they can eventually contribute.
Centralized platforms that control user activity can themselves be controlled, and that control can travel upward to governments, regulators, or anyone else with leverage over the platform provider.
Linux exists, in Richell’s telling, as a counter to exactly this dynamic.
For California and Colorado, he sees effectiveness lost. For New York, liberty. The education-based alternative he advocates for isn’t a policy position so much as a cultural one: teach children to navigate a complicated internet rather than delay their access to it until the habits are already formed elsewhere.
