alt Hacker News>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.
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.