That would be a solution if the people pushing this actually cared about "protecting kids."

But let's be honest, governments want a dragnet they can use to monitor/control all internet communication. The people running western democracies are equally as power hungry and zealously authoritarian (my ideas will bring utopia!) as the people running the CCP.

The only difference is, the CCP has permissionless authority, so they ended internet freedom in China decades ago. They didn't have to ask.

Western authoritarians on the other hand, have to fight a slow battle to cleverly grind you down over time, so that you get tricked into allowing them to gatekeep the internet. It hasn't worked so far. The next step (this one) is "okay, so you don't want to have to ask us permission before you visit a website...but won't anybody think of the poor beautiful innocent children???"

Emotions activated. Rational thought deactivated.

They'll get what they want because they always get what they want. And you'll be convinced it's good for you over time, because most people just follow whatever the mainstream "vibes" are, and the elite sets the vibes. It's amazing a free internet existed this long. Great while it lasted.

i'm only half joking. adding zkps to http requests is probably the correct privacy preserving technical solution that could be built into something sensible.

the bigger issue is that lawmakers are thinking in terms of smartphones, tablets and commercial pcs as shrink wrapped media consumption devices with a setup step... not protocol level support that preserves parts of computing and the internet they don't even really know exists. seems like the ietf should have lobbyists or something.