> I am so puzzled by everyone who objects so strongly to these operating system based opt in systems

The government legislating APIs is an uncomfortable precedent given the culture wars that are raging right now. There seems little reason to expect this will stop here.

They are not legislating specific APIs. They are legislating that an API has to be provided, just like other laws legislate that you have to provide accessibility APIs, but the details of the APIs are left up to the companies.

I work in aviation, a highly regulated field. And that's a good thing. It does take some work to regulate well; there has been a migration in aviation to more prescriptive regulation about how things need to be, to less prescriptive like what the ultimate performance needs to be. But yeah, the aviation regulations aren't that you have to implement something a specific way, but that you have to be able to show that your aircraft has no more than a certain probability of catastrophic failure (where the probability varies base on certain things like the size and type of aircraft).

For this age verification law, all that is required is that there is an API provided for this purpose, and there is a way for the owner of the machine to set up user accounts with age information indicated, and that the APIs need to provide several rough age ranges, not specific birthdays.

What does "the government legislating APIs" mean? The ADA means every OS has to support screen readers.