Heavy-handed web regulations are pushing us toward a dystopian future. Shifting filtering directly to the router level fixes the problem without forcing adults to hand over sensitive ID data.
The push for this form of age verification is to “close the loop” of strong identity between a physical person, and online content access. And unfortunately, all the relevant parties are aligned on this one:
Site owners want to prevent non-people AI from accessing their content
Authoritarian leaning governments want to track and control who gets access to what, and who can even make content available in the first place
Ad Companies want to make sure ads are being served to real people
Operating system vendors can kill open source by ensuring this is mandated at the OS level, in a non-bypassable way, so signed/TPM/closed source nonsense.
Parents who don’t understand the technology enabling this but believe that this ‘protects the kids’ will also support it.
We’ve tried this before. In 1997. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_Selection
The push for this form of age verification is to “close the loop” of strong identity between a physical person, and online content access. And unfortunately, all the relevant parties are aligned on this one: