Why not? For particular industries like healthcare, you do need to verify your age for PII/HIPPA

most websites know exactly who you are, who you live with, and what things you like. profiling is not just a luxury enjoyed by government

I sort of like these restrictions. You're making hard for me to access your site - I close it. You block it behind a paywall - I close it. You block it because of ublock - fine again, I close your site. I have only so much time and you're helping me.

It’s a hand out to advertisers losing uuids.

Age verification is about one thing only, it's about controlling how you participate in public society. The state wants a veto on public participation that they don't like. This system will not prevent children from being exposed to unsafe spaces, but it will be effective at barring people with counter political narratives from sharing online. Look how they've desperately tried to crack down on Epstein and information on Gaza. They want the same controls over information and political content as China.

I wish we lived in the timeline where the most reputable and market-leading age verification provider was PornHub, which would have a modestly dressed model check via video chat. I'd actually trust that more than the actual providers that exist in reality, and hey, if even 1% of the money goes to college tuition, great. Of course, if that was how this worked, the optics would kill most of these schemes before they were implemented.

As a parent, I'd like to point out that the threat I care about is not "my kid of age N talks to a sicko of age M, where M - N > P for some legislatively-prescribed value of P".

The threat is "my kid of age N talks to or can be observed by a sicko".

These age verification schemes do nothing to help against that. Also, the worst predators online are often the vendors providing "kid friendly" services.

On top of that, these laws are being pushed hardest by the worst of the most corrupt politicians on earth. Why would I install a webcam on my kid's machine because that group of people wants me to?!?

Maybe we should focus on prosecuting the backlog of stuff in the Epstein files pertaining to politicians pushing these age verification services, not let anyone (except parents) control how kids access stuff online.

Stop making your kids my fucking problem/annoyance.

Some company or, hell, the gov't setup a proxy service that whitelists the internet and have your kid use that. Do your fucking job.

The only people who can be trusted with any form of identity (including age) vertification is the government. You know, the same people who issued the identity documents and know who you are.

It's not some SV-backed startup. It's not Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon or Meta. It's the government.

We’ve had age verification for decades. It just depends on specifically what is being verified. Congress passed Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act back in 1998, that basically made it extremely tedious for websites to serve children under 13 years of age. How did everyone manage this in the early 2000s? Every child simply lied to the website with an incorrect birthdate. Now that was before real name policy was instituted by social networks and it was also common for people to provide a false name to websites. This approach of “asking the user for a birthdate and accepting it as true” is the only age verification method that’s sane.

See, I think, you're not supposed to continue using those services as before. They want them all gone, and so-called age verification is a means to chase away users that are less dedicated.

What I think must result is, a monotonic cultural erosion and deprecation of such platforms and regions implementing those restrictions, and continuous replacement with engineered and packaged foreign imports from venues and regions from psychological "upstream" where there aren't such restrictions. But I guess that's what they explicitly desire.