'AnimalMuppet has the right take upthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49249774): "Once you accept their right to ask, then you open the door to their right to a truthful answer, and thus to a verified answer.

> But they could also just implement verification now, which many governments are trying to do.

That itself is a proof: the voluntary age declaration was and is common on all the services that governments are now trying to force to do age verification, and it wasn't enough.

EDIT: in more general terms, and going beyond age verification thing and over many recent developments in information security, the Internet as a culture is missing an on-line equivalent to a key real-life social feature: the ability to answer with a shocked "gross!", followed by slapping the asker in the face.

But we already accept their right to ask. Certain websites have had age restrictions on them for years. There's nothing new to the idea that certain media is not permitted to certain age ranges. (This is leaving aside the idea that people generally agree that age restrictions and age verification are perfectly fine in public spaces in the physical world, and that the internet is very much an anomaly in this regard.)

Moreover, nothing really seems to have changed in the enforcement of that (as far as I understand, specifically focusing on laws like Illinois') — it's still ultimately the responsibility of parents to ensure their own child doesn't access restricted websites. This legislation would essentially provide a mechanism that makes it easier for parents to do that.

So no, I don't think that that is the right take.

I also find your edit somewhat amusing, as the key reason that age verification is such a topic is because of a different missing real-life social feature, which is the ability to look at someone and identify whether they're an adult or a child, alongside the ability to look at someone's ID without recording all their personal details forever. As they used to say, on the internet, no-one knows if you're a dog, which is both a strength and a weakness. Identifying mechanisms like this (ensuring parents have more control over their own computers, but not requiring full verification anywhere) seems like a reasonable approach to fixing some of the weaknesses of internet anonymity, while still preserving the basic strength that identifying yourself is always opt-in.

Nope. It's a stupid take. Especially considering over half of the US states have jumped right to looking for that verified answer but no one on HN gives a shit when red states do things. They only ever bitch and moan when a blue state is doing something far less invasive and then they have to turn it into a conspiracy theory that the blue states are secretly trying to do what the red states are just blatantly doing in the open with zero push back.