What I find quite interesting is that the internet was kind of the wild west in the early 2000s, it was exciting and vibrant, a kind of diaspora. Then in the late noughties early teens we saw massive consolidation through market forces, everyone moved onto Facebook, everyone moved into walled garden social media platforms and even the social networky ways of discovering organic content died off (Digg redesign, death of stumble upon etc.).

That was.... bad, but it wasn't a moral decision it was kind of just market forces. The market means that no one can run a taxi company anymore, you're just kind of all employees of uber or whoever your local monopoly is. Not great, and arguably the way they got there should have been under more scrutiny but it was more or less pure market forces.

What is happening now is not market forces. What is happening now is rich people telling the government to institute legislation that hands power to rich people. Whether it's Elon Musk's public funded, privatized space programme or Thiel's public mandated, private enforced age-gating. All of this is corrupt. There's not really another word for it.

The biggest change imo is that in the aughts, the idea that children should have unfettered access to personal computers, phones, and the internet was unthinkable. Now we have millennial parents seriously arguing their kids should have smartphones in class. But all this deanonymization garbage is downstream of that vibe shift.

I don't think it's responsible to blame any specific person or company, but I certainly can't excuse the Googles, Apples, Samsungs, Facebooks etc of the world. They manufactured a culture driven by putting as many devices in front of as many people as possible, using them as much as possible, while knowing as much about them as possible to monetize their attention. The careless disregard for how that affected the developing brains of two generations of people now is irresponsible and ugly.

It seems like no one is asking the real question here, which isn't why Roblox/Discord et al need to verify the age of their users. We should be asking how in the fuck there are so many children with unsupervised access to devices that this is a real problem.

As a socialist, I would argue those are both inevitable outcomes of capitalism.

First market forces incentivize consolidation (which imo killed off the vibrant early internet...), then a few players got really powerful.

Once you have that much money and power, and given the inevitable corruptability of politicians, it makes sense to try and use that money to try and manipulate market rules in your favor.

The evolution of the internet has been an in-vitro demonstration of capitalism failure modes and as somebody who liked the internet, that's very unfortunate.