TLDW:
Brazil is requiring OS level age verification by march 17th, 2026.
New York about to vote on a law that would “require all manufacturers of internet-enabled devices, operating systems, or application stores to conduct commercially reason-able and technically feasible age assurance for users at the point of device activation.”
In order to “incentivize” age verification, The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced that they will ignore COPPA violations for software performing age verification.
Or switch to one of the growing number of Linux distros who have taken the stance of “not a fucking chance are we complying with that idiocy” and then just hope where you live doesn’t pass a law like this and those distros are forced to region block downloads for you 👍
There’s also the worry that if enough places push something like this through, could end up being a case of a vast swath of the internet will just refuse to work without receiving an approved “Age Assurance Signal”…
Or the bigger worry that this is the beginning of the end of proper human interaction with the internet. Access and child protection laws become so strict that only chat bot agents are legally authorised to use the internet and we all become beholden to these programs for everything from looking up a recipe to requesting access to research papers to help support your masters thesis or fucking whatever.