https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/29/mastodon-says-it-doesnt-have-the-means-to-comply-with-age-verification-laws/
Comments on lemmy for this link are, curious:

Government sets up page to verify age. You head to it, no referrer.
Age check happens by trusted entity (your government, not some
sketchy big tech ass), they create a signed cert with a short
lifespan to prevent your kid using the one you created yesterday and
without the knowledge which service it is for. It does not contain a reference to your identity. You share that cert with the service you
want to use, they verify the signature, your age, save the passing
and everyone is happy. Your government doesn’t know that you’re into ladies with big booties, the big booty service doesn’t know your
identity and you wank along in private.

But oh no, that wouldn’t work because think of the… I have no clue.

And followup comment down the chain:

The fact that they haven’t gone for this approach that delivers age
verification without disclosing ID, when it’s a common and well
known pattern in IT services, very strongly suggests that age
verification was never the goal. The goal is to associate your real
identity with all the information data brokers have on you, and make
that available to state security services and law enforcement. And
to do this they will gradually make it impossible to use the
internet until they have your ID.

We really need to move community-run sites behind Tor or into i2p or
something similar. We need networks where these laws just can’t
practically be enforced and information can continue to circulate
openly.

The other day my kid wanted me to tweak the parental settings on
their Roblox account. I tried to do so and was confronted by a
demand for my government-issued ID and a selfie to prove my age. So
I went to look at the privacy policy of the company behind it,
Persona. Here’s the policy, and it’s without a doubt the worst I’ve
ever seen. It basically says they’ll take every last bit of
information about you and sell it to everyone, including governments.

https://withpersona.com/legal/privacy-policy

So I explained to my kid that I wasn’t willing to do this. This is a
taste of how everything will be soon.

If i'm reading that right? They're saying 'you hand us your data, and
we can do with it whatever we like.'
That's the company that's gatekeeping roblox (I don't play. but this
one came to mind because i saw the link in a discussion.)
Apologies if I'd missed any discussion when porn sites started doing
this. It isn't that I didn't care then, it's more i'm kinda dealing
with apathy based on my current living situation giving me few real
options. This is more me seeing a trend i know others keyed in on well
before now on the web still technically being open (because TCP/IP
doesn't care who you are) but the services everyone cares about
suddenly behind middlemen gatekeepers that conveniently are government sanctioned highwaymen.
Welp.
Guess it's good that we have options huh? Not perfect. Not One to One
options, but still, Options. Mostly. Because it's bad enough I feel
like i have no options in meatspace.
There's more I could say, but it gets into political ranting and. You
guys don't need that.
So instead. I'm mostly just considering 'OK Is this going to expand so
that just getting onto the internet is going to require ID above and
beyond having to pay for an ISP? I don't think so because to me that
makes no sense, and so long as the network itself is accessible, we
should be. Well. not 'OK' so much as 'we have options' I suppose.
--- Synchronet 3.20a-Linux NewsLink 1.2