Google needs a fucking customer support line already. Make it a 900 number if they need to and charge $20 per call, but for the love of cheese the number of times something goes horribly wrong and there is little to no recourse is silly. They refuse to let people pay for their services and thus establish a billing verification channel but they're asking users to put tons of important information into them with no recourse if something does happen.

I think he learned a valuable lesson about how to use the Internet: lie about everything.

This isn't a microblogging service or pet social network. A domain registrar is storing your password in plaintext? Really? Didn't we go over this a thousand times?

If I was on Hover (which I considered), I'd transfer my domains immediately. Moving to a plaintext password system to get fewer support requests is like removing the door from your house so you don't have to keep fumbling for the key.

I think it's a horrible way to teach about civil disobedience.

The point of civil disobedience is to get the law changed. By quietly lying about your age, you're doing the opposite, you're making it harder to get the law changed. Civil disobedience is about adding friction to the system as an incentive to change the law. By doing something nobody can notice you're adding grease.

It's not civil disobedience if nobody notices what you're doing. It's not civil disobedience if you aren't inconveniencing people in power.

By lying about your age, you're breaking the law purely for selfish benefit, which is not the lesson a parent wants to teach a child.

Sacrificing himself by following the law, and spreading the story widely as the author and his son have done will do much more to get the law changed.