Exactly. A little at a time. First it's adult sites, because if you need to show ID to buy alcohol, shouldn't you need ID to buy pornography? Once that's accepted, expand the sphere of control to non-adult sites too by redefining everything as 16+.

I wonder why the rating code is so complex. Pornhub.com has this code enabled, but it also uses a simpler . 4chan also uses the latter.

Parents are much better at knowing their own kid's age than corporations are. Teens keep fooling the age verification (pointing the camera at a video game character, using fake ID, even drawing beards on their face with a pen). But they aren't going to fool their own mother, and they don't need to trust ID verification startup with photographs of everbody's teenage kids to do it.

I'm beginning to suspect Apple complied in advance because their new devices have image-recognitions technology, but their competitors don't (particularly old hand-me down devices). Build a safety feature, have it made mandatory, and leverage the government to outlaw your competitors!

On a daily basis they've got a new idea to mess with our devices. Will users have to pass ID verification to avoid screen time limits too? Why is everything that used to be Parental Controls being made mandatory?

I have to get off this site before the tech news gives me an aneurysm. Let me give a prediction. To access the internet at all, you will need ID linked to government identity by some kind of token, the goal being to make it impossible post anything that can't be tracked to an individual. A bunch of major services are going to abandon the UK entirely to avoid the paperwork, but it won't matter.