[CPLX]

Yes there is.

You need to pay for a drivers license or a passport and so on. So there is an intrinsic cost to prove who you are where you are from and what your birthday is already.

You have to pay for all sorts of small things to participate in normal society. This isn't a serious criticism.

By definition this is not a life critical thing, it's something that is procured in order to access specific services on the internet, which is not free.

[fluoridation]

>You need to pay for a drivers license or a passport and so on.

I have a government ID and I didn't pay for it. I can use it to travel to nearby countries in lieu of a passport. The assumption that IDs are necessarily non-free (to the issuee) is pretty funny to me.

>it's something that is procured in order to access specific services on the internet, which is not free.

The maintenance of the Internet is already paid for through ISP contracts.

[CPLX]

I mean, if you really want to make the government subsidize an ID verification scheme or mandate that certain real-world locations provide age verification as a social service for everyone, that's fine.

It's orthogonal to the discussion, though, which is about whether we should do it or not, because the costs here aren't significant and don't change the terms of the debate.

[fluoridation]

I'm personally in favor of just banning children off the Internet, but I don't agree it's orthogonal to the discussion. What I replied to was the implication that someone should pay a recurring cost to prove they're an adult for the same reason that they pay to own a computer or to connect to the Internet. Don't disown the dumb thing you said.

[CPLX]

I'm not disowning it at all. I think paying a recurring cost to prove you're an adult for purposes of accessing the internet is completely fine, trivial, and unimportant.

You have to pay a cost to go out in public, since there are nudity laws. You have to pay a cost to use an airport or a train station. You have to pay a fee to prove that you own a car. And so on.

It just doesn't matter. It's not important. It's consistent with how we organize our society in general, which makes focusing on it in this one particular instance more understandable as an attempt to distract from the substantive merits of these arguments about age verification.