alt Hacker News> In a physical store they're neither de facto nor de jure required to check your ID when you're clearly an adult, and many of them don't. There is no feasible way to do the same thing on the internet so instead it effectively becomes requirement to ID everyone, which is different.
1) Not true. The burden is on the seller to verify age. Sure, they can try to do it visually but if they fail they are still liable.
2) Even if true, nothing changes in a legal sense if they lose the ability to informally verify age because thats not a legal right of the consumer. It's just an incidental feature of buying in store which some people value. There may be a difference there, but its not a legal one.
3) Texas law didn't mandate age verification by ID specifically.
> Sure, they can try to do it visually but if they fail they are still liable.
That doesn't really have anything to do with the issue that there are practical ways of doing it in person without demanding ID but not online.
Also, those laws tend to have Problems if they actually try to enforce them that way. If the police get a 17 year old a convincing fake ID that says they're 21 or contrive some other circumstance where the seller would reasonably believe they were an adult and then try to prosecute someone for selling to a minor, judges start thinking things like maybe due process doesn't allow the government to get away with that.
> Even if true, nothing changes in a legal sense if they lose the ability to informally verify age because thats not a legal right of the consumer.
"Acquiring information anonymously" is a legal right of the consumer. Laws with chilling effects are a violation of the First Amendment.
> Texas law didn't mandate age verification by ID specifically.
But you're asking why it's different than doing it in person. It's different because the available mechanisms of ascertaining age are different.