It's interesting that we talk about the false-positive-- "we're declaring a 45-year-old a child for reasons", but it would be interesting to see the false-negat

It's interesting that we talk about the false-positive-- "we're declaring a 45-year-old a child for reasons", but it would be interesting to see the false-negative rate. We're well into the second generation of kids raised to see a signup screen and say "Yes, I'm over 13/18/21/whatever" to get to content, mixed with a huge cohort of "the entire family is using one computer and shared account" users that will garble any sort of profile-based analysis, any estimates they're doing are shooting a blunderbuss in the dark. I can imagine a school-child urban legend mindset of "log into a new account and browse irs.gov for a few hours to make sure it thinks you are an adult" developing. This is so clearly an industry in a "if we try to do something ourselves, we can hopefully cut off pressure towards something legally binding" panic (see video game ratings), but if they're not actually blocking effectively, you'd think that would be very interesting news to the people arguing for blocking. If the rest of the world watches the UK step into shit and still say "we still want to get ourselves some of that", I'd much rather it be done by a government than a bunch of private companies. A government service has no commercial motive to deliver anything but the most minimal "this user has verified age 18+" responses, and has a legal responsibility to service all comers. Leaving it to the private sector creates an splash damage scenario: spinning up or licensing a compliance service is couch-cushion change for the Facebooks and Googles of the world, but breaks a million independent small players. We've already seen this in the UK with forums closing rather than trying to comply. And you know the firms that offer ID verification aren't going to let all that juicy PII go to waste and delete it.