> If there were honest intent, then the regs would be beefing up the "Parental Controls" mechanisms present in every major OS

Not everyone knows they exist, and there's a huge install base of older and/or cheaper devices that may not be getting updates that could be strengthened like this.

> Not only does this mechanism require zero involvement of an unrelated third party

But what if we do want to regulate the behaviour of those third parties? We know they've been cognisant of the harms and addictive behaviours their stuff promotes (see internal Meta research), and in fact seem to have designed for that. If the controls are only at the consumer side, are we not likely to see an arms race where they continue to try to addict kids around the controls?

You're also assuming a level of technical sophistication on the part of parents, voters and politicians that would necessarily lead them to come to the same conclusions as yourself about solutions. This may simply not be present.

This is what I mean by "good arguments that won't land". We can talk about how solutions should work, whether solutions can possibly work, and even make strong arguments that regulation in this area is wrong in and of itself. Jumping straight to "they're all liars and only want to spy on me" makes the entire thing look like a group of fringe nutters unable to take onboard how people (particularly non-tech people) feel.

> Not everyone knows they exist...

"Oddly", the laws that demand you enter your birthday (and will eventually demand you scan your ID) seem to require OS producers to make it so that users will not be ignorant of these new features. [0] I wonder if it's possible to do the same thing for Parental Controls...?

> ...there's a huge install base of older and/or cheaper devices that may not be getting updates that could be strengthened like this.

They're not going to be getting updated to be compliant with any of the new state (or Federal) user-identification regs, so I don't see what good-faith reason you could have for bringing them up.

> But what if we do want to regulate the behaviour of those third parties?

You use law and regulation? You mention nothing in your subsequent paragraphs that a "Papers, Please!" mechanism will prevent that a "Beefed-up and difficult-to-bypass Parent Controls" mechanism will not.

[0] For example, AB1043 says (among other things)

  1798.501. (a) An operating system provider shall do all of the following:
  (1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.