> I know parents who have no problem with their kids seeing porn.

I don't agree with showing actual children porn, but I also totally expect teenagers to find some way to get access to it in the age of the Internet.

Part of the challenge with this is cultural. Different places in the world think about sex, sexuality, and even the concept of what is a child differently. In the US, showing a woman's bare breasts to a person under 18 is generally considered wrong, and in many cases is illegal. In most of Europe it wouldn't even raise an eyebrow, because bare breasts are on television, sometimes in commercials even.

Set aside for a moment the question of age verification and age limits, we cannot even agree in any sort of universal sense what even qualifies as porn or adult content, and at what age someone should be able to see it. There's a difference between a 7 year old and a 17 year old seeing the same type of content, and there's also a difference between a photographic nude and a video of people engaged in coitus.

The story is basically the same for everything else you listed.

These age verification laws in many ways are trying to use the most heavy-handed mechanism possible to enforce American cultural norms on the entire planet. That's clearly wrong to do. What the GP suggested using RTA headers though puts the control into the parent's hands, which is as it should be.

We don't need to care what France or China thinks when we make our laws that are about our own citizens. They do the same over there.

> These age verification laws in many ways are trying to use the most heavy-handed mechanism possible to enforce American cultural norms on the entire planet. That's clearly wrong to do.

Yes there's a chance our rules spill over there naturally, and I don't consider that wrong either.

I considered many of the same points you mentioned.

Though, one area I am still struggling to grasp is the harm that governments are trying to mitigate. If a child were to see inappropriate material, then what harm can truly arise? Also, why do governments need to enact such laws when the onus of protecting children should be on their parents?

I am not trying to start any kind of flame war, but I really cannot see any other basis for all this prohibition that is not somehow traceable back to Western religious beliefs and the societies born and molded from such beliefs.