It seems like a kind of a paradox that online video games are held accountable for servers that they have nothing to do with, but meanwhile a browser can be truly open and doesn’t have to employ any restrictions like age verification, or banning ips? Not even China goes after the browser level.
They aren’t. The restrictions are mandated by Microsoft, not governments.
They do have to take action in regards to their own Realms servers, but that’s it. Restrictions on random unaffiliated Java servers are either for brand image or other selfish reasons. For example, someone here mentioned chat for UK teens, that one is almost certainly to force ID verification into the game, not to actually comply with anything. It’s for data harvesting.
what restrictions are you talking about?
chances are, those are restrictions Microsoft is demanding. (for example, child safety. or “child safety”, considering gates is a pedo.) It uses game files that are controled and licensed by Microsoft.
The browser on the other hand is an application that uses a standard, open, protocol to take information and turn it into a readable page with all the content you like to see.
It’s not the browser’s fault that pornhub uses the same protocol as, I dunno… whatever biblestory website evangelicals think is “safe”. (do Song of Solomon next!)
Regardless, Microshit owns Minecraft, and they get to decide what restrictions it has on it.
There is also ability for external filtering.
It is easy to buy additional software to restrict websites. That equipment doesn’t work for most video games.
In reality, it’s likely that it’s because Minecraft is largely targeted to kids. The primary presented idea of Minecraft is a game that is appropriate for kids. Web browsers don’t make the same kind of presentation–their purpose is to render websites, but don’t otherwise promise anything regarding the content viewed.
It would be a bit similar to a department store that stocked knives in the kids’ toy section. Selling knives isn’t really problematic, it’s where they’re located and the implied intent of that section.
I don’t think Minecraft is accountable - they are just being controlling for no reason. Minecraft was fine for the past 15 years of it’s existence and people kind of just accepted that 2b2t doesn’t represent Minecraft or Microsoft as a whole
I don’t really know what a browser does, but that sounds analogous to punishing a tv manufacturer for someone playing a pirated film on their tv.
If you provide the server, the actual computer used to provide a service, you are responsible for that server. Minecraft Bedrock servers are operated directly by Microsoft and as such are something they are responsible for.
The browser accesses any and all servers for web pages. Regulating the browser would not work as they have no control over the content, nor do they have the ability to effectively filter.
The confusion comes from you running two similar programs on your computer and having one of those behave differently to the other. The key is that the game client is a client only for that game, but the browser is a client for any web server out there. The client is not regulated at all, the server is. Anyone can access any web server from a browser, but only one server from a game client.
Interestingly WoW has custom servers which are not operated by Blizzard and as such Blizzard is not responsible for what happens on them. The operator of the server is the responsible party here and has to control their platform.
You need to use minecrafts game files to access minecraft servers.
There are hundreds of browsers available, and since the standard is open it’s easy to create a new one.
