The breathless fearmongering over an age field on account set up is just completely over-the-top. This is probably 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? Legislation like this 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.

least bad way to implement age checking is just asking user

This needs to be simply fought because it's a measure that is supposed to fight the reluctance of the society, not actual problem. For the actual problem it's ineffective. This will be met by surprise once it's fully implemented and new, worse measures will be proposed. Hence, it needs to be cut off as early as possible to spare everyone the trouble.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticipatory_obedience

Like the authors of these bills, you appear not to understand the technology.

Consider AB1043. It mandates that applications check the age of the user each time the application is launched.

Think about what that means when you run `make` in a source directory. How many times is the compiler application launched?

No, derangement is declaring "The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end." without fighting it at all and just mindlessly accepting it because you were told it was going to happen.

It should be really easy to get your bank account information then. You're just going to give it to me, right? What is this? You're fighting me tooth and nail instead of celebrating giving me your banking info?

Well, perhaps your mental model of the actual objections to it are incomplete. There are a few problems and I'm curious what you have to say about them. First, "The benefit of this is that it can short-circuit support for more onerous age verification". Do you think that it "can" or that it "will"? Big difference. It could also go the other way, right? Opening the door to a more onerous version? Why do you think that isn't worth considering? Secondly, "This is probably the least bad out of all possible ways to implement age checking". What about parental controls that exist already? Someone seriously tried to tell me last time that parental controls "suck", but that's irrelevant, they don't have to suck, and in fact anything can suck. That's just happenstance. So, assuming parental controls were correctly implemented, why do you think this is "least bad" including parental controls? Thirdly, this "age verification" doesn't actually verify anything, because underage people can just choose "adult" anyway. What do you have to say to that? In that case, parental controls actually give you more power, and make this new age check completely obsolete. Thoughts? Lastly, maybe you're not from the USA, but we have a concept of "free speech" which includes the idea that people cannot be "compelled" to certain speech. If people were required to add a "sign here to confirm you're an adult" in every romance novel, that would be fine right? It's also a nothingburger, right? But then, you've compelled people to put something in every published book. Actually, that's a bad analogy. We should say that ALL BOOKS require this signature field on the first page. After all, we don't know what kinds of expletives and horrible things people might have written in the margins of the book (assuming it's being sold second-hand). That would be okay with you, right? Nothingburger? But it compels people to write something, and that's a door most legal scholars know not to open.

> The writing has been on the wall for some time now: the era of completely unrestricted internet is coming to an end.

And books..? And the newspaper? What if a child reads about a horrible murder in the newspaper that keeps them up at night? What if the government outlaws books and newspapers because they can contain bad things? We'd better add a "adult/ not adult" checkbox to the first page to "short-circuit support for more onerous age verification".