They're pushing because the loonies are pushing. The loonies are passing age verification laws and big businesses don't want the responsibility.
Now... it just so happens that the loonies and big business are connected another way. Despite not much liking each other, they share a political party to advance each other's goals. Only a relatively small fraction of the country really wants to eliminate porn (which is the real goal), but they have enough allies who are willing to tolerate it to make a majority (or near-majority).
Which enables big business to get everything else that they want.
They want us trapped on their platforms and absolution from obligation to police their platforms
They’re involved in indemnifying themselves legally while jacking up RAM prices to prop up their data center investments and make us use those data centers to compute
And they get the government help making us the bad guy if we lie about age verification
They are playing both sides of this argument because doing so keeps them in the conversation altogether. They sell TIE Fighters and Xwings
The entirety of American society has gone absolutely off the fucking rails kowtowing to office dweebs who need to keep us tending the server fields or their buy in data centers becomes worthless
Now... it just so happens that the loonies and big business are connected another way. Despite not much liking each other, they share a political party to advance each other's goals. Only a relatively small fraction of the country really wants to eliminate porn (which is the real goal), but they have enough allies who are willing to tolerate it to make a majority (or near-majority).
Which enables big business to get everything else that they want.