SN1009 - real goals of age verification

[dusanmal]

It is dangerous to miss the real goals of "age verification" trend. It is intentionally technologically impossible as it is just a foot in the door for the real totalitarian goal, clearly and most recently stated by Spanish PM at the 2025 Davos meeting: "I propose putting an end to anonymity online... No one can drive car without license and license plate.... And, yet we are ALLOWING people to roam freely online without linking to their real identity... thus paving the way for misinformation... such ANOMALY can not continue...". Enough said, it is pointless to discuss technological solutions for a false problem which is just a distraction from the real, unfortunately achievable goals of totalitarians to eliminate all online anonymity.
My personal guess on how will this be achieved is ratcheting mandatory digital IDs through age verification->social media->any presence on the Internet and ratcheting mandatory IPv6 and direct presence of every device (associated with owners dID) on the net. Technologically doable, and clearly pushed by no less then prominent PM at the world "leadership" forum. Will be supported by propaganda works like children safety, terrorism, misinformation, hate speech,... all in progress already.

 

[user]

It is dangerous to miss the real goals of "age verification" trend. It is intentionally technologically impossible as it is just a foot in the door for the real totalitarian goal, clearly and most recently stated by Spanish PM at the 2025 Davos meeting: "I propose putting an end to anonymity online... No one can drive car without license and license plate.... And, yet we are ALLOWING people to roam freely online without linking to their real identity... thus paving the way for misinformation... such ANOMALY can not continue...". Enough said, it is pointless to discuss technological solutions for a false problem which is just a distraction from the real, unfortunately achievable goals of totalitarians to eliminate all online anonymity.
My personal guess on how will this be achieved is ratcheting mandatory digital IDs through age verification->social media->any presence on the Internet and ratcheting mandatory IPv6 and direct presence of every device (associated with owners dID) on the net. Technologically doable, and clearly pushed by no less then prominent PM at the world "leadership" forum. Will be supported by propaganda works like children safety, terrorism, misinformation, hate speech,... all in progress already.

Totally agree. I was struck that this whole issue would be better understood by clearly differentiating between ingress controls (by a website) and egress controls (by any initiating party).... In enterprise contexts this is clearly understood - if corporation 1 wants to prevent its users from visiting reputationally problematic destinations then it will filter destination urls on egress since this corporation could not reasonably expect the destination sites to block their users for them! I think this is zero trust 101 - the party which bears the risk should implement the control otherwise the incentives are never aligned to the outcomes we want. If we apply that lens to the question of age verification, then the party who bears the risk is again the "initiating enterprise" - ie. the person in the household who has administrative responsibility for the router.... this is absolutely classic denial hypocrisy stuff - we want to blame the websites for allowing permissive access, whilst doing absolutely nothing about the settings in our own egress control systems.... If people would like to prevent their children from accessing such material then they should restrict that within their LAN. I think legislators could probably make much more progress by requiring that routers ship with less permissive defaults in place and you have to positively choose to change them locally. As Steve and Leo suggest there will of course then be a playground market in workarounds, but isnt that its own age verification anyway - those capable of defeating their parents attempts at security are probably fine to make their own choices.