I think this legislation is as dumb as everyone else does, but it also seems like the cheapest way for everyone to agree that we did something about the moral panic without actually giving up anything. It doesn’t do anything with ID or privacy or even actual verification. There’s no complicated auth dance to do with government services to verify our age tokens or whatever the latest Rube Goldberg machine “zero knowledge” age check proposal is.

I’ve been shocked at how many HN comments always come out in favor of age related legislation and heavy government regulation when the topic comes up. The pro-regulation commenters always seem to assume the age checks would never apply to them because they don’t have use TikTok or Facebook or other services, yet few realize that there aren’t going to be laws written in a way that only apply to a couple named companies you don’t use anyway. If we age verification laws then they’re going to be everywhere.

I personally hope this legislation dies and we can be done with this silly exercise, but if we’re stuck with age verification moral panic than a simple OS-level switch that we set once and then forget about seems like the least intrusive form of “age verification” we can get away with.

I think the writing has both intentions. Both implicate companies to comply as well for the mass to not defend. If it was not, there wouldn't be a guy on TV saying that there are 5000 possible pedo cases that are not being investigated and that's why they need it.

Anyone with more than 2 brain cells can put it together

> I personally hope this legislation dies and we can be done with this silly exercise, but if we’re stuck with age verification moral panic than a simple OS-level switch that we set once and then forget about seems like the least intrusive form of “age verification” we can get away with.

Just for clarification. CA AB1043 was signed back in 2025 and takes effect January 1 2027.

I disagree with your overall sentiment that this is benign because it's ineffectual in its current state. If anything, this is going to warm people up to the idea of government mandated prompts gathering personal information in their OS, and legislators in 2030 (or whenever) are going to say: "this isn't working, lets build on top of that prompt we already have and make it verify IDs"

In other words, I think this first bit of legislation had to be watered down to not receive too much backlash. This is the governments first plunge into mandating things on the frontend.

You're on the right path, but the "something" politicians want to do is specifically "regulate Facebook's patent harms to children". Facebook's counter-argument is: "we don't have a legally ironclad way to check user age, it should be Apple and Google's job". So the politicians want to write a law to make it Apple and Google's job to check age.

In other words, all of these age verification laws are here predominantly to indemnify Facebook from a growing wave of child endangerment lawsuits in a way that will ensure Facebook doesn't have to kick off even a single teen from their platforms. That's why the "verification" is just a date and an age range bucket.

My personal opinion is that these laws are stupid, but not harmful to Linux users, and that everyone angry at systemd for complying is shooting the wrong guy. Your real target is Facebook and you should be yelling at your local representative to make this bill not target Linux distros.