[NoPicklez]

I think you can look at all things pessimistically, like this article does but at the end of the day we all agree that there are things online we don't want our kids seeing or engaging with and it takes regulators to push how we protect them from those online places. What other options to regulators have?

Age restriction has been around for longer than the internet itself, so its regulators applying that logic to the online world.

Whilst I think age verification has its issues, I don't see what other options they actually have. I'll also make the point that in Australia, our regulations explicitly require that Government ID verification CANNOT be the only way and that companies must adopt an additional approach.

Almost everything in technology used to protect us can be used against us by those want or choosing to do the wrong thing, does that mean we don't do anything?

[microgpt]

I like the California law where the device owner sets the parental controls and apps have to obey them or get fined.

[Nursie]

Yep, there are all sorts of technically interesting ways in which age can be proven without identity being compromised, this link has a good exploration of anonymous credentials, for a start - https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/03/02/anonymou...

And there are all sorts of reasons governments want to do this, up to and including the stated-on-the-surface reasons they give; a lot of people don't want their kids exposed to internet harms, be that extreme material or addictive services and doom-scrolling, and don't have the technical know-how to effect that themselves.

The insistence by so many in tech that there is no honest intent and that there is no way to practically provide age verification in a thoughtful, anonymous way is frustrating.

It's frustrating to see so many people engaged in effective conspiratorial thinking and it's frustrating because there are many good arguments to be had here, but they won't land if the 'anti' side doesn't address the real concerns that real people have about the safety and mental health of their kids.

[simoncion]

> The insistence by so many in tech that there is no honest intent...

If there were honest intent, then the regs would be beefing up the "Parental Controls" mechanisms present in every major OS and commanding that there be fines for not respecting those settings. Not only does this mechanism require zero involvement of an unrelated third party, it allows a guardian to protect both a child too ignorant of the dangers of the world to be trusted to competently handle them and an adult whose mind has been so damaged by age and/or disease that they can no longer handle those same dangers.

Instead, the systems that we're getting are ones in which computer users are -when it's not mandatory- very, very strongly encouraged to present photo ID to a third party. While all the US regs I can find currently "only" require adding mechanisms for punching in a birth date, it's all but certain that continued evidence of minors lying about their age will cause those laws to be "upgraded" to require a photo ID.