It's also worth noting that some of those trillion dollar companies have had staggeringly bad responses when confronted with the fact child predators are running amok on their platform.

The CEO of Roblox is probably the single easiest example to point at; when confronted about his platforms issues when it comes to enabling child abuse, the first response he had was to claim that child predators were an untapped market and then claim to be interested in adding a dating site feature to Roblox.

That's the kind of rethoric these bad laws are a response to, and is the elephant in the room that a lot of the tech industry fails to recognize. (Including the privacy advocates, for whom every nail looks like it has a hammer shaped solution.) Age verification isn't a good solution to this problem, but it at least forces the hands of these companies to address it if they don't want to face jailtime for knowingly abetting predators - they can't pretend to have clean hands anymore if they're mandated to verify user ages.

There's almost certainly better solutions, but that's also why attestation (where the source device transmits the user's age, rather than storing a ton of PII of them elsewhere) misses the mark. Attestation doesn't fix that problem.

I also assume the "get better at parenting" folks have zero kids themselves, and likely (because HN) work directly with those technologies targeted by the governmental measures. But answering to their point, getting better at healthcare only worked when the society stepped in, also getting better at pensions, at work-life balance or gender equality. So yes, I WILL get better at parenting, namely by supporting all other parents as well and putting the technology under our control - not the other way around.