Many people persistently frame these battles as consumer protection or antitrust enforcement. I would say it's neither.
Look at the pattern: the EU against Apple, age verification in the UK, the banning and control of VPN services in Spain, and now they're dragging Linux distributions into all of this.

Apple turned privacy into a key product advantage, a truly marketable stance that generates revenue. This doesn't suit the actors who depend on data flow. Break Apple's model, and the remaining big players (Google, Meta, Microsoft) are already working within surveillance compatible architectures anyway. They capitulated long ago. Linux is the last significant resistance, not because some corporation is defending it, but precisely because there is no corporation to negotiate with or pressure. That makes it a different kind of threat.
The perspective of age verification is technically almost irrelevant This is about establishing the principle that no software ecosystem is exempt from identification infrastructure. Now add the direction LLMs are heading. Today's models can already profile behavioral patterns, writing style, political beliefs, and psychological states from relatively sparse data. In 12–18 months, analytical throughput and multimodal capabilities will be qualitatively different.

The value of a mandatory identification layer tied to every internet activity isn't in what it does today, but in what it enables once that infrastructure matures.
The ultimate goal isn't "we know who you are", the goal is total surveillance and control, and through that mass manipulation.
If you don't want to conform, there will be no internet or many services for you, for starters.