> age verification system effectively becomes an identity verification system.

this is fundamentally wrong and accepting this as an industry will only lead to required identity verification becoming the norm sooner or later

the important realization is age verification is in the end "just" a form of parenting tool

this means

- it doesn't need to be a "perfect", glancing at the age of a passport when buying adult products isn't perfect either, but it's good enough. And it doesn't require seeing the address, name, (in most cases) day and month, gender etc. on a id, nor any form of "noting them down".

- it doesn't need to be attestation based, unhackable or anything like that. It complements parenting, not replaces it.

- in turn it also shouldn't need anyones id, in most places children below 18 don't need any id but 16+ is still a age barrier

or to lay it out in rough design

- require multimedia devices sold to have a child "mode" functionality

- allow setting a age category or age (to auto determine and update the category), require a age set for this purpose to be kept private on the device and not shared, analyzed etc.

- require web sites and apps to have voluntary min age limits, similar to other products, block access _client side_ based on this information. The standard should allow region/country specific limits and reason tags.

- There are a bunch of edge cases omitted, like sites serving dynamic content/platforms in general. Requirements for parents to be allowed to define exceptions (in both directions) and handling of sides not having your countries age gating. Etc.

- properly educate parent about it

this provides sufficient functionality to support parents in parenting without requiring any identity verification or overriding the parents right to parent

yes, it's not perfect in many ways. But it doesn't need to perfect, it's "just fine" for what it tries to archive.