If you need personalized government attestation to visit a site, then the government has the ability to dynamically deny and rescind your individual access to any site that adopts age verification, at any time.

Once adult sites adopt the system, it will creep over to any site wanting to limit their liability. Banks. Business services. Eventually almost everyone.

Liability the government will dramatize and escalate. You won't see the government pass any laws to create age-liability safe harbors.

Wikipedia is already being forced to fight to not implement age verification. Age verification managed by the government = No Wikipedia access without individually tracked, controlled and revokable government permission. [0]

Seldom has a slippery slope been so slippery.

The distance between government controlled per-citizen access to obviously adult sites, and government permissioned/controlled access to any site of substance, does not even involve a technical hurdle. It just becomes a site adoption curve. Every adoption increasing the scope of real-time government surveillance in our minute-to-minute lives, and its real-time at-will ability to deny access to whatever it chooses, whenever it chooses, and for whoever it chooses. In any combination.

Dystopia is here.

In my opinion, this is terrifying.

We need: Third party attestation, providable by anyone/entity meeting basic openly-defined criteria, limited to age attestation only, implemented with Zero Knowledge Proofs, to create a safe anonymous (unsurveiled/no personalized denials) alternative, to take the wind out of the sails of this constant governmental power grab. If it isn't solved by security minded technologists and the marketplace, the freedom destroying version will prevail - and it won't be undone.

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/we-support-wikimedia-f...