Comparing it to something like alcohol is a bit tricky, because there are proven health risks. There are adverse effects on development and physical development and all kinds of terrible things that can happen to young children if they're exposed to alcohol too young. I think about online space very much as being like public space. We don't have age restrictions on public spaces, on parks and the streets. Kids are allowed to be in public. If we think about being online as just an extension of being in public, then putting an age restriction on that I think is really problematic.
That doesn't mean that we can't have rules and legislation that would help guide what the practices should be and how kids should be addressed and treated. There are parts of this online public that are definitely inappropriate. I'm thinking about extreme examples here, just as in our physical world we also wouldn't let kids wander into certain stores and certain places. So I think having the same types of more nuanced, more considered rules and approaches would be applicable here, as opposed to having age restrictions. They rarely work in an online world, because age restrictions do put a lot of the onus on kids and families.
That's why I think COPPA has been deemed.... I don't think the Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act in the States is a complete failure. I think it did result in a lot of good things. Other people have deemed it a failure because kids are able to bypass the age restrictions. That's maybe taking too much of a blanket approach, and it also puts the onus on kids and parents to do all the monitoring. The age restriction is there, and if they're not abiding by it, then they're kind of punished.