@serapath @mhoye well .. ok, in the hypothetical world someone passes that law and somehow makes it work at a global scale I might get a little more worked up over it .. except it's still only a 4-state age-bucket that is of no relevance to anyone over 18, and is far less of a burden than any of 100 other factors that allow or deny me access to a given website. like there are paywalls all over the internet. are you not equally upset about that? it seems not. and in the meantime, I don't think the imaginary future you're projecting is all that likely to happen. you'd need enough 13-year-olds-who-bought-a-burner-phone-to-circumvent-their-parents-phone-ownership to get parents worked up over it, to the same extent they got worked up enough to pass the current law. I don't see that happening any time soon. I think it's much _more_ likely that age verification gets so much misguided pushback from people like you that it fails, then the parents change tactic and get section 230 struck from the books, and all platforms self-censor everything and we wind up with disney-net full of 100% least-offensiveness stuff, for risk of liability. but .. anyway I'm not trying to have the debate about "do parents have a right to control their kids", I think probably parents over-control kids but I'm not a parent so what do I know? my point is they have a set of concerns, they're enacting them in laws now, and the OS-level owner-sets-a-bit system is the _least bad_ way we know of addressing their concerns. and I expect it will mostly address their concerns. or at least enough to take the wind out of their sails politically.