a digital wallet with ZKP could resolve ‘are you old enough?’ without the query ever needing to leave your device.

without a digital wallet, it could be done with fully homomorphic encryption.

both of these would be innovations which i feel require guided development. innovation counter to the goal of the legislation, which is surveillance. innovation driven by the self-proclaimed purpose of ‘protecting children’; innovation driven by the impetus to make it harder for people to masturbate.

since the general attitude right now has been ‘require agegates and just leave it up to The Market™’, then the solution in practise will probably be a private third party that brokers this information, probably with a natural monopoly, that will charge exorbitantly for their API, have Google Analytics running on every page, leaks like a sieve, leaves logs everywhere, and will probably get caught selling data, which will incur a one-time fee equal to 80% the size of the company’s rainy day fund, and maybe the CEO will be asked to step down, shielding the rest of the C-suite from consequences (and allowing them to just do it again). they’ll work closely with law enforcement, they’ll be breached in the first year, and probably have a huge leak 4 years later.

in that time, due to real changes in the law or jurisprudence, or companies just ‘playing it safe’, age verification will come to encompass queer identity, sexual education and health, war coverage, counterculture and even history. more online regulation just means more barriers to entry which means a larger monopoly for multinational corporations.

i think there are better uses for this technology than controlling pornography.