Why would you want every site on the internet to traffic in government IDs? This is by far the least bad out of all possible ways to implement age checking. The benefit of this is that it can short-circuit support for more onerous age verification. The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end. The question is how awful will the new normal be? This implementation is a win all around, a complete nothingburger. We should be celebrating it, not fighting it tooth and nail.

The tech crowds utter derangement over this minor mandate is truly a sight to behold.

> This is by far the least bad out of all possible ways to implement age checking.

Not quite. The least bad (that I'm aware of) is to mandate RTA headers (or an equivalent more comprehensive self categorization system) and to also mandate that major platforms (presumably OS and browsers, based on MAU or some such) implement support for filtering on those headers.

But sending a binned age as per the California law is the next best thing to that.