I wouldn't hold your breath. The government is reliant on them for surveillance, censorship, and propaganda. It is a synergistic relationship, not adversarial.

It should have been the government providing an identity verification API, like they already do in the physical world with physical IDs. Governments dropped the ball, and so now Apple and Google get to be infrastructure.

We cannot vote with our wallets because there’s no real competition. That’s the problem with the big tech companies and other monopolistic companies in other areas.

These days every time a government as much as thinks of imponging on a supranational corporation's right to do whatever the hell it pleases you'll hear no end of cries ranging from "overregulation" to "tyranny".

For an example, see EU's GDPR, DMA etc.

The technical challenge is actually the smaller one. The real one is to get people to care. Don't be tricked by the HN/techie bubble. Most people don't understand the problem, or don't see it as a problem because nothing smacked them in the face yet. Any attempts to explain it makes you sound like a lunatic to some, or just a bit of a worrier to others.

Whether it's targeted ads, or training AI on their data, or verifying their age and implicitly identity, or "fraud defense", most people happily take it in exchange for a convenient freebie which is why things keep escalating.

It's understandable, people are assaulted with all kinds of abuses from every direction. There are more immediate threats that they can grasp more easily so this stuff has to wait its turn.

Those are specifically targeted to boycotts of Israel, which ties it to anti-racial discrimination law.

You think systems that have adblockers installed will keep being able to pass WEI / Google Cloud Fraud Defence checks?

This is an attestation scheme. Attestation is about controlling what software you are and aren't allowed to run. If a future version of this allows desktop browsers rather than just phones, it will almost certainly try to do similar forms of attestation, and prevent you from controlling your own software stack.