I'm fine with providing my identity for online banking and other finance platforms for legal & taxation purposes.

I can't think of a single other use case in which I'd be willing to verify my identity. I'd rather go back to hosting email myself, and am fine with circumventing content access control for all other platforms for personal use.

We're seeing the world slide towards authoritarian strongmen, and we want to give them a massive index of who we are and what we do? I'd rather not.

The problem is those self-same authoritarian strongmen are very successfully using sockpuppeting to change national discourses in ways that benefit them and are detrimental to the targeted countries. Hybrid war is real and has been ongoing for more than a decade. LLMs make it way more cost effective.

Being able to limit the influence of external bad actors is the main goal of ID verification. Age verification is a useful side effect that makes it easier to sell to the general public.

Big Tech has had at least a decade to fix this, did nothing of note, and is all out of ideas. Privacy advocates had the same time to figure out a "least bad" technical solution, but got so obsessed with railing against it happening at all, that nothing got any traction.

So governments are here to legislate, for better or worse. They know it's a trade-off between being undermined by external forces vs. the systems being abused by future governments, but their take is that a future authoritarian government will end up implementing something similar anyway.

>circumventing

I would say the time to buy mesh networking equipment is now. But it's not like I'm capable of defending the transmitter. So when they come for the VPNs, the VPSs, and encryption, I guess I'll just be out of luck.

(Out of luck = resigned to zero digital privacy. No matter I follow the law and “have nothing to hide” of course.)

Perhaps people will pass flash drives like North Korea or Cuba?

People trade away longevity for short term convenience. Then when that convenience is shown to be bad/unhealthy people refuse to give up that convenience.

So many aspects of our lives are like this now. People just accept defeat cuz it would mean giving up one click ordering or free return shipping or they might have to look at labels to avoid bad companies.

Honestly I think these age verification laws are blunt instruments responding to the decade of avoided moderation the big platforms have managed to pull off.

I've run ad blockers for years now, but I'm still trying to forget those disgusting zit popping pictures that trended in ads for a while. Or those incredibly stupid life hack shorts, like the one where someone tied a cord around a mug and the hack to get it loose was smashing the cup... that crap made me despair for humanity as much as the Gaza genocide.

But google and facebook convinced the legislators that it would be impossible to keep that chum away from kids on their platform, so the legislators are going with the next option: banning the kids from the platforms.