> Government is demanding age verification because the websites and platforms completely punted on the issue of keeping inappropriate content from children.

Nah. Parental Controls are baked into every major consumer OS. If government cared about giving guardians the tools needed to care for the vulnerable ones they're responsible for, they'd require those parental controls to be beefed up [0] and that it be a requirement that online services and both local and remote software be required to honor the restrictions required by those Parental Controls.

Instead, what we get proposed is a system that cares very much about how old you are, and not one bit about the things that one's guardian understands one needs to be protected from. This system will work for some under-eighteens, but it will fail for many others, as well as every single dementia-damaged elder or brain-damaged/developmentally-stunted adult.

What's being proposed is absolutely not about protecting people... if it were, the mandate would be to beef up the existing fully-anonymous systems, rather than requiring identifying information from users.

[0] ...I mention this because I often hear in Internet discussion that these controls are insufficient, not because I have personal knowledge that they're inadequate.