It's crazy to me that we want to force age verification on every service across the Internet before we ban phones in school. I could understand being in favor of both, or neither, but implementing the policy that impacts everybody's privacy before the one that specifically applies within government-run institutions is just so disappointingly backwards it's tempting to consider conspiracy-like explanations.

The advantage, I think, of age verification by private companies over cellphone bans in public schools is that cellphone bans appear as a line-item on the government balance sheet, whereas the costs of age verification are diffuse and difficult to calculate. It's actually quite common for governments to prefer imposing costs in ways that make it easier for the legislators to throw up their hands and whistle innocently about why everything just got more expensive and difficult.

And the argument over age verification for merely viewing websites, which is technically difficult and invasive, muddles the waters over the question of age verification for social media profiles, where underage users are more likely to get caught and banned by simple observation. The latter system has already existed for decades -- I remember kids getting banned for admitting they were under 13 on videogame forums in the '00s all the time. It seems like technology has caused people to believe that the law has to be perfectly enforceable in order to be any good, but that isn't historically how the law has worked -- it is possible for most crimes to go unsolved and yet most criminals get caught. If we are going to preserve individual privacy and due process, we need to be willing to design imperfect systems.