Comment by donmcronald

It's not about restricting access to porn. That's just the easiest way to get their foot in the door. It's a group funded by a tech mogul lobbying the government to legislate the use of age verification technology. I would bet my life savings the people behind the lobbying group(s) stand to benefit financially.

I guarantee you the goal is to collect as much identity information as possible and that's going to include getting parents to "enrol" their kids in the system. The carrot will be lower friction to access online services and the average person won't understand that someone lobbied to create the friction so they could sell the solution back to us.

Ultimately the goal is probably to create government authorized identity providers, maybe even just one, and they'll make tons of money from it. It might end up being "free" for people, but only because it'll be funded by taxes. If they succeed, we'll likely end up with a private company doing identity verification for government service just like the USA and id.me.

And we also get to pay the price of making the internet more dangerous for kids. The thing these lawmakers don't realize is the insane value children place on their online accounts. Once you limit them to a single account, because it's tied to a real world identity, they'll be terrified of getting banned and losing their account.

That might sound like a good idea in the context of fostering healthy online participation in games, etc., but the reality is that kids are gullible and it'll open them up to exploitation by bad actors. Kids will be getting phishing notifications telling them their account has been flagged for illegal activity and they need to pay a fine to unlock it. They'll go to some shady website and type in their VISA debit card number, which is enabled by default on most kids' bank accounts, and get their bank account cleaned out.

Remember, if you lose your account, you can't get another one, so you better pay the fine, right? And what kids are going to go ask their parents for help if they're being accused of bad behavior? None of them.

The core of the problem is that by tying online accounts to real world identities you make those accounts so valuable that people will act irrationally when threatened with the loss of an account. It's not just kids either, but kids will be the most vulnerable to exploitation.

Our politicians are a bunch of low IQ suckers that are getting played by rich tech bros that don't care if they make everything worse as long as they making money.