Comment by simoncion

> I'm not sure what additional fine grained factors you may be thinking of precisely...

Read [0] and consider the array of specific things that a guardian may wish to protect their ward from. Make sure to make your list cover children of all ages as well as adults with a wide array of cognitive impairment.

> That being said, age based restrictions isn't a fine grained control over the system as perhaps one would like but that also would be inherently more complicated to think about from a legislative perspective...

So? Legislative or regulatory restrictions on human behavior must be as restrictive as required to achieve the stated goal, and not significantly more. The courts are especially concerned about this when it comes to restrictions on speech. If a set of legislators need to sit with something for a quarter or two to understand it well enough to properly regulate it, then that's what they're getting paid to do.

> ...when it looks like a lot of parents are looking for a blunt generic button...

You can have preset lists of categories to block in a system that doesn't care at all what your age is. Surely you know that.

> Presumably, under the law, parents would be the ones to create a child account with a non-editable-by-the-child-account age fields...

The California law has no such requirement. Go read it, it will only take like ten minutes. [1] My summary of it as "the kids can lie about their age and there are no consequences for lying" is not even a little bit unfair.

> Our laws already very much care about how old you are.

The identity-verification systems we're talking about didn't exist twelve months ago. These are new systems being designed in a world in which it's trivial to have a centralized database that contains dossiers of all of everyone's customers everywhere. [2] Nearly all other regs that restrict based only on age were written in a world where that was either impossible, or extremely expensive and time-consuming.

Even if that weren't true, all one needs to do to see how these regs will be actually interpreted by most businesses is to look at all of the companies that are preemptively requiring upload of live video, pictures of one's face, pictures of one's government-issued ID, and/or deep analysis of one's activities with their systems. No US state requires any of that, but it all got slammed in when legislators started talking about doing age-based restriction of Internet services.

Had legislators clearly said "We're going to be designing and enacting laws that require designated guardians to be able to prevent their wards from engaging in guardian-selected categories of activities. We want every guardian to be able to protect their wards, regardless of the age of those wards.", you'd see companies building and deploying very different systems.

[0] <https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...>

[2] Am I saying that there exists a centralized database of all of everyone's customers everywhere? Absolutely not.