Fuck that. These laws almost always seem like a move BY surveillance capitalism to ID all user traffic, using the state (regulatory capture or bribery) under the guise of “child protection”. If we lived in actual democracies, instead of capitalist plutocracies, the easiest way to universally apply this and preserve civil liberties would be to incorporate a broad age indicator — “adult”, “teen”, and “child” — into every web comms protocol. If it were at the OS / browser level parents could then setup a child or teen account and, unless the child figures out the admin password, they’re stuck with it; every request their device makes to the Internet will include it.

Then every site would only be responsible for checking that value and required to block “child” &/or “teen” from specific services or content… That’s basically how ID’s work when you visit your local alcohol dealer or sex shop - “adult” / “not adult” is all they need to know … Hell, ban all advertising, data capture, use of analytics in content discovery, etc for non-adults. Let children use the internet the way it was before parasites took over. No friction for every user. No requirements for people to hand over their PII to countless corporations (which should be limited as much as possible). No games of whack-a-mole. At the end of the day there will always be workarounds, but it’s the parents responsibility to monitor their children; not the internets, or rest of society.

“I’ve fallen and can’t get up!”

Whenever you take away peoples access to information and social groups, you cause them harm.

Its the same as trying to teach abstinence to children or hiding them from information about drugs. Its better to teach children about sex and drugs so they know what is safe and what is not safe then leaving them in the dark, where they’ll end up doing the unsafe things and learn the hard way