That was openly coordinated beginning with the Montreal Protocol. Those things work top to bottom with international accords in the beginning and don't suddenly pop up left and right inside of much less than a year. Getting a ban on lead in fuel took ages with Europe implementing it a decade later.

These kind of laws usually take many years to hone down just right and talk to all parties involved. Unless some lobby group presents a finished piece of work that just has to be waved through, like with the Citigroup scandal.

If you're proud of incuriousness, you'll never see evidence. I think I should be looking for evidence of the push being organic. I don't see it pushed anywhere but from the top down, even at sometimes heavy political costs to the incumbent leaders who are pushing it.

You should always be asking who politicians are serving. You seem to comfortable with thinking that they must be serving some part of the electorate without actually needing to identify that part. A lot of people think social media is bad for teenagers. There are a lot of things that are bad for teenagers that we aren't making any particular, coordinated effort to ban.

> Who do you think is behind this?

I don't recall off the top of my head but in past HN threads the global lobbyists for this were named with evidence.

It's intriguing to me how there's seemingly a lot of objections in this thread to the idea that this movement was driven by lobbyists. I realize it's skirting the guidelines but the tone here comes across as some sort of astroturfing particularly when I consider the general tone of past threads on the same topic within the past few months.

> Who do you think is behind this?

Anyone who is interested in connecting an identity with every computer on the internet, like a tamper proof license plate for computers. Just ask local law enforcement.

There has been a growing awareness for the possibilities of foreign states to manipulate social media and other platforms with fake personas. So any kind of counter intelligence would be interested as well.

There have been numerous incidents of politicians trying to go after critical posts using defamation laws. Often enough the investigations find a dead end when the account can't be connected with an ID.

Religious advocacy groups have been more and more aggressive in trying to censor the internet, e.g. this Australian one that boasted having pushed Mastercard and Visa to enforce age verification https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/mastercard-vis...

So the list of suspects is actually long.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was a very broad lobbying campaign that very easily finds local interest groups to help them meet the right law makers.

> And the car manufacturers all decided to install spyware because it made them money. That just capitalism.

Yes, you are right, it must be "capitalism" at fault. The sort of capitalism where nobody asks for the product, nobody wants the product, and yet somehow the product is the only choice you have.

> You may be a libertarian,

I am not. I don't label myself, but if I were forced to slap a label on myself it would be something like an anarcho communist. It's not that I don't believe in regulations helping, is that I feel like this is plastering over a deeper issue, which is parents having children, but not having enough economic security to have the time and resources to devout to their parenting properly and so turning to the state for oppressive restrictions in favor of good parenting.

It's the reasons teens spend time on these apps that should be looked at by the state, not how to block them from doing so in other words.

Fair, maybe. That'd be the better case I suppose. However that be more like banking apps not liking rooted phones. The California law is more like your OS not allowing you to access resources unless you prove your age, not the external resource doing so.

> Websites should be allowed to decide who's visiting them

No, hold up, you just casually introduced a dystopian goal of facilitating the casual collection of government ID by website operators. I absolutely do not want the equivalent of South Korean ID numbers in order to do pretty much anything online.

Anyway as I always point out when these threads come up we've yet to try the simple and noninvasive solution. Websites should be required to send a content categorization header. Large enterprises that fail to do so should be fined. If that were uniformly happening it would then be possible to do proper client side filtering (right now that fails miserably).

Before anyone asks, app stores could be required to implement the equivalent of the header in an appropriate manner of their own design.