It drives me a little bonkers that the UK already tried implementing age verification in 2019, with an approach that would have been easy to make verifiably anonymous: buying a single-use code from a newsagent who checks your age with ID [1], but can't connect the code to you specifically

That attempt officially failed because the UK failed to inform the EU about it, but I suspect it was also much harder to sell people on having to buy "porn passes" than on "just" kicking kids off phones

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/oct/16/uk-drops-pla...