Protecting kids is well within the scope of the government.

This “it’s the parents job” is also reductionist. It is, but somehow we still have made it illegal for minors to buy hard liquor and pornography from physical stores in the United States and few argue that restriction is wrong.

This is my take, but I am a bit frustrated by OS manufacturers. The obvious move is have a screen after factory reset the puts the device in kid mode permanently. It then will send a "I'm underage" flag to sites, and sites return no content (or safe content) when they see that header. This is a system that makes it easier for parents to do their parenting job. All the pieces of this system already exist, but the UX for managing a device during setup to be a "kids device" isn't there.

This system is good for a bunch of reasons:

* It gives parents control such that they can tailor the experience to their kids. This is a problem with current proposals.

* It doesn't bring identity into the mix at all, completely defusing the risk of mass surveillance.

* It's easy to verify if adult sites are complying: hit them with a curl request containing the header, check the response. This is much easier that verifying that Discord is checking user ages properly using their face-scanning technology.

Protecting kids and other vulnerable people matters to everyone, so why not the government? What would think of a country where, let say your mother cannot go out without fearing getting robbed or raped? Same for kids. Maybe you do not have kids and you do not care. Anyway being a parent does not mean being behind your kids at every single moment. I hope you have not spent your childhood under constant supervision of your parents. So at some point everyone is concerned about protecting kid, and not only there own ones

This approach has clearly failed and something different should therefore be attempted.