I don’t think so. That would be a hard thing to enforce and rather pointless. Comparing it to other internet regulations like the GDPR, it’s not illegal to use a website that doesn’t adhere to it. That said, with the amount of stupidity we tend to see in politics, who knows what some countries might do.

What may happen is that the websites get blocked by the ISP at request.

Lemmy does manage to circumvent this by the fact every instance has its own domain and cached content.

Most likely, 4chan.org will be blocked and a British Firewall will be added.

aussie.zone

But FWIW, the australian law only applies to the sites they (the government) have explicitly told have to comply. They are marketing it as “all social media”, but it’s only, among others, facebook, tiktok etc.

It absolutely won’t hold up. I think it was tongue in cheak

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When Facebook and/or Instagram asks for ID (something that have been taking place for years, I myself had to send my driver’s license alongside a selfie holding it when I used to use Facebook several years ago), it needs to be manually checked by Facebook staff. The account stays in a “locked state” before the ID is approved, so it’s essentially a “need-to-apply” situation. I also remember seeing TikTok asking for people’s IDs, way before this age checking thing (part of the process to monetize a TikTok channel), with the account being locked out of the monetization sections of the website before the ID is approved. Google does the same for Youtube and other parts that involve money (such as Google Cloud Platform and Google Ads so to embed ads into a website).

Indeed the number of applications is sheer, but the amount of admins/staff they have at their disposal to check all those applications is also bigger than most Fediverse instances could dream of.

Then there’s also AI (corp-grade, not the average ChatGPT we people have access to) automatizing the flow, not as the ultimate approval, but more as a filtering mechanism (discarding selfies/ID photos that are clearly not a selfie/ID) so the staff has to check just what seems like legit selfies/IDs photos.

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it will also not feel nearly as invasive as having to scan your face and hope the provider doesn’t save it somewhere.

Even when anonymized, the information may still ship with some PII (Personally Identifiable Information). That’s how the user can be checked as the one requesting access (because a kid could be using their relatives’ account, so the age check checks not just the age, but also who’s checking the age). For age checking systems without direct PII (name, social security numbers, etc), there’s still some kind of UUID that will persist across requests, so it’ll essentially work as a tracking cookie.

The result from the age check, anonymized or not, still needs to be saved, and once saved, it’s already a slippery slope: it will be used for “better” advertisement, it will be used for “better” algorithmic recommendations, it will be used to keep track of users behaviors online.

Alongside AI (not the LLMs we, the “mortal people”, have access, but things way more “sophisticated” in that regard), they could keep cross-reference an “anonymized age check token/UUID” to a real person solely by relying on the increased digital footprint: then, all of a sudden, the health insurance gets to know the sexual habits of someone and can promptly raise prices when they detect the imminence of sexual problems/complains, the renting corp gets to know their tenant got “frequent sexual activity” (or, even worse, some specific kinds of “kinks”) that could (in their bigoted minds) do some damage to the walls, so they can suddenly change the renting contract or raise prices to cover for wall painting, both parties can now know the political preferences (do we wonder why the US branch of TikTok is now asking for “immigration status” for US citizens? How could they possibly know the SSN for an USian TikTok user? The age checking, be it something already being done in the US or something that will become a reality soon (I’m not updated in this regard), is part of the “how”).

That’s the “Big Data” in action: crossing swathes of information across systems and databases, and corp-grade AI is another mechanism to achieve this.

Imo something like this would be magnitudes better than the current reliance of video identification

To some extent, indeed it is. But, in practice, it just delegates the video identification to the government (the citizen info is tied to biometrics, and authentication using things such as “EU wallet” may need 2FA with face biometrics within the government-backed app). There’s still going to be face recognition somewhere down this “age checking” road, be it corp-backed or government-backed.

Depends if the wallet records data of what site required verification. Any amount of privacy being eroded is bad.

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Countries don’t need Great Firewalls for things that are becoming “consensus” globally (such as biometrics for web access): the way Internet works is, itself, a Great Firewall. Govs govern over their respective ccTLDs, telecom regulators (FCC, Anatel, etc) govern ISPs, as well as EM allocation (so Meshtastic and similar radio approaches for Internet-less networks could also be ruled “unlawful” whenever they want). IANA governs which countries and ISPs got which sets of IP numbers (IPv4/IPv6), ICANN governs TLD attribution to countries and corps (there are corps with their own TLDs, such as .google, ICANN is always involved as the ultimate “DNS keepers”). Then there are things such as CloudFlare, increasingly omnipresent (insofar large swathes of the Web go down whenever CloudFlare goes down). So the Internet is already heavily centralized, making it trivial for countries to enforce something when said thing transcends geographical boundaries, such as the “protect children”.

Great Firewalls are only a thing for imposing local politics, and it’s not always recognized as so: Brazil, for instance, have already been banning apps and platforms (ANATEL have been taking down entire IPTV servers, judiciary have been taking down social media platforms; I’m not entering the merit of it, just saying it’s already a thing around here), and we don’t hear “Brazil has a Great Firewall”.

We could think that corps are implementing checking mechanisms unwillingly. In fact, they’re the ones who profit the most: age checking means a new fingerprinting factor, even when age checking is “anonimized” (it still got a unique session identifier, moreso than commonly-used fingerprinting mechanisms). Ad partners are cheering!

Dark web: as much as I’m fond of it and used to participate there (Onion, I2P, former “Freenet” now “Hyphanet”, among others), they’re also reliant on Internet infrastructure. And when there are fewer countries where there’s still a regulation vacuum, there are fewer places to use as a bridge/router.

Then, something I didn’t mention before because it wouldn’t fit the char limit: the hardware and software oligopolies. No matter which OS and software we use, we’re still reliant on Intel, AMD or Qualcomm processors. We’re also still reliant on two major browser engines (Chromium and Firefox). The Tor Browser needs to be run inside a device with a CPU, and it also needs… a browser engine. Both engines are going down the AI road, maybe browser forks (inc. Tor Browser) are still managing to prune the clankers from the upstream, but the upstream is still needed to implement the fork, and the upstream can easily be bundled with binary blobs as dependencies for fundamental functions in the software (similarly to how, e.g., Windows Shell is dependent on Microsoft Edge so Edge can’t be pruned without crashing the whole OS)

Web is so entangled, it’s becoming increasingly hard to avoid the enshittification. ☹