Basically these age attestation/verification laws are being pushed as a "save the children!" scenario. But if you read the laws - all they really do is shift responsibility around.

Currently, websites and apps are supposed to ensure they don't have kids under 13, or if they do - that they have the parents permission. That's federal law in the US.

These laws make the operating system or app store (depends on the particular law) responsible for being the age gate.

This doesn't stop the federal law from being enforced or anything, but the idea is apps/websites don't handle it directly, that's handled by the operating system or app store.

So now - companies like Meta can throw up their hands and say "hey, the operating system told us they were of age, not our fault." It also makes some things murkier. Now if Meta gets sued, can they bring Google/Apple/Microsoft in as some kind of co-defendent?

I think that murkiness is the point. They don't need to create the most bullet-proof set of regulations that 100% absolves them of all responsibility, they just need to create enough to save some money next time they get sued.

I can think of a ton of regulations we could create to better help protect kids. We could mandate that mobile phones, upon first setup, tell the user about parental controls that are available on the device and ask if they'd like to be enabled. Establish a baseline set of parental controls that need to be implemented and available by phone manufacturers, like an approval process that you need to go through to hit store shelves.

We could create educational programs. Remember being in school and having anti-drug shit come through the school? It could be like that but about social media (and also not like that because it wouldn't just be "social media is bad," hopefully).

Again all these laws do is take what should be Meta's burden, and make it everybody else's burden.

Forget about the stated reason for the laws. The fact is that it makes sense that people using a service are age-appropriate. And there is no market mechanism (I mean tort law) because of Section 230.

Now the easiest law change - that wouldn't required anyone to change anything - would be to revoke Section 230. This would make service providers liable. Everything else is a band-aid. I doubt that this verdict will survive appeal (due to Section 230). But if it does, then again there is no need for any new regulations. The tort lawyers will solve the problem for us.

If we do have device age verification, then it still doesn't shield Meta. The lawyers will sue everyone involved, and disclosure will show if Meta had data that will have shown that user should have been blocked.

The purpose of age verification is to avoid all this. Of course the current proposals suck and won't achieve this. The market will not accept an approach that would work - which would be for anything with a screen or speaker to be permanently tied to an individual user. "OS verification" cannot succeed - it must be one-time hardware attestation. Even a factory reset wouldn't remove the user assignment.