I agree. I don't call it "age verification" though - it is age sniffing. And it has nothing to do with children - that is the lie.

What is fascinating is to see how governments ALL fall for it. There is zero resistance. This is fascinating to me. It shows how little real effort is necessary once you have the lobbyists in place. Kind of scary to witness too.

It is an apartheid system. All apartheid slavery systems will eventually die, so age sniffing will die too. But it will most likely be a long fight as more and more money will be invested by crazy corporations such as Palantir and others.

The whole "debate" is already not logical by the way. Let's for a moment assume the "but but but the kids!" is a real argument rather than a strawman argument, which it is. Ok so ... I am a "concerned parent", for the sake of discussion. I have three young kids. I am not a tech nerd. The kids see "unfitting content" on the antisocial media such as facebook and what not. So, what do I do? Well ... they have a smartphone? Aha, so ... I am not so concerned? Having no smartphone is no option? Ok so ... I say they can have a smartphone, but they may not use antisocial media. Ok. First - in any free society, is it acceptable that this kind of censorship is done on ALL kids? What if I, as a parent, do not agree with this? Well, tough luck - the laws force you into the age sniffing routine suddenly. But, even those parents who want the state to act as totalitarian: why would I want to hand over control to ANY politician for that matter? That makes no sense to me. I am aware that some parents may think differently, but do all parents think like that, even IF they buy into the "we protect the children" lie? I don't want ANY information from ANY of my computers to go into private hands here. So the whole argument already makes zero sense from the get go.

Of course those who know how things work, they know that this is the build up towards identifying everyone on the world wide web at all times AND to make access to information conditional, e. g. if the state does not know you, you can not access information. Aka a passport system for the www. Built right into the operating system too. Windows already complied. MacOSX too. The battle for Linux will be interesting; it may be some hybrid situation, like systemd. And the systemd distributions will all succumb to age sniffing, courtesy of Poettering "this is really harmless if we store your age in the database, just trust me".