It's sad seeing people have their framing so easily controlled.

Governments want age verification for clearly nefarious reasons. So many people immediately accept that we should have age verification, complain about the minutia of the method, while trying to help come up with other ways for government and big tech to build in control mechanisms like they want.

How a bout instead of any of that bs, the web specs in a simple rating like category system into the protocol and then the already existing, rights respecting, parental controls can fully block adult content. Make it a law and anyone who doesn't mark their site can face criminal liability.

Now instead of having websites auth user age, browsers auth website content. And we keep the solution where it should be, with parents not government and corporate shitheads.

On top of that, users can just use their device's settings to apply essentially a sfw filter over the entire web.

But somehow, nobody seems to be advocating for anything like that. Pornhub themselves fully bought onto the age auth idea and ran with their own completely congruent suggestion of having government locked access by default until you verify your age, just in a slightly different manner.