> Build and promote alternatives that don't.

How well has that worked? Social media and messaging apps have network effects.

> Host services elsewhere, ignore claims that a country's laws extend beyond its borders.

That doesn't help the French or the Finns. Unless they use a VPN. And access the fragmented, lightly-used alternative services from the IPs of the fewer and fewer countries that don't pass such laws.

Your vision leads to a world where the privacy-conscious 1% congregate in echo chambers on Mastodon instances hosted in international waters. Everyone else uploads their passport to FaceSnapTok.

That's not a real solution. It's a cope. That's my opinion and I have no illusions I've changed your mind about anything. I already alluded to that in my original post. Privacy activists think age verification is not a problem that needs to be solved. By maintaining that belief they're ceding ground to bad actors who will "solve" it in a maximally privacy-invading fashion. This will leave the vast majority of internet users worse off.

> Privacy activists think age verification is not a problem that needs to be solved.

Correct. But more importantly, privacy activists understand that the "problem" governments are trying to solve with "age" verification is people having privacy.

This isn't something we can solve with purely technological solutions. It requires political action to defeat the attempted control, and pushing back on every instance of people trying to paint that attempted control as mere "age verification" and other "think of the children" takes.