Age verification doesn’t work

Impact on Porn Sites and User Behavior

• One side predicts age verification (AV) will bankrupt “law‑abiding” porn sites by driving users to non‑compliant, shadier sites; a UK example is cited where compliant sites lost ~40–50% traffic after AV.
• Others doubt that most users would rather risk CSAM/revenge‑porn–adjacent sites than verify their age, noting offline age checks are accepted for alcohol and gambling.
• Some argue legislators intentionally want major porn platforms to withdraw from certain jurisdictions, using liability as a back‑door ban.

Circumvention and Enforcement Limits

• VPNs, Tor, alternative protocols (FTP, private forums, in‑game sharing) and offshore sites are repeatedly mentioned as trivial workarounds, especially for motivated teens.
• Commenters expect blocks on commercial VPNs and VPS IP ranges to escalate, mirroring Netflix and Great Firewall dynamics, but also foresee new evasion methods.

Privacy, Identity, and Trust

• Strong resistance to uploading government ID or biometric data to porn or social sites; risks cited include identity theft, surveillance, and “internet licence” regimes.
• Even “trusted government entities” are seen by many as untrustworthy, with AV equated to broad tracking of what sites people visit.

Technical Proposals and Counterproposals

• Some describe EU‑style OpenID handoffs, bank‑based identity claims, and zero‑knowledge proofs (ZKP) that reveal only age brackets.
• Critics say real deployments today are ID scans or face scans, while ZKP remains mostly proof‑of‑concept and often tied to locked‑down Google/Apple ecosystems.
• Ideas floated: ISP‑level or BGP‑based adult/child networks, parental controls at OS/router level, age‑approximation via behavioral signals, and offline‑bought anonymous “age tokens.”
• Objections: weakest‑link families, usability for non‑technical parents, and danger of client‑side filters morphing into centralized censorship.

Harms of Porn and Role of Parents vs State

• Wide disagreement on porn’s impact on kids: some see clear distortion of expectations and normalization of extreme acts; others say population‑level effects are small or unproven.
• Many stress the lack of honest sex education and the taboo around talking about sex, arguing that silence leaves porn as the default teacher.
• Recurrent theme: parents have underused existing controls and often offload responsibility to tech companies or governments.

Politics and Broader Concerns

• Several view AV as part of a broader trend toward control, surveillance, and public‑private “safety” regimes without accountability or meaningful effectiveness metrics.
• Others insist adult content providers are legally bound, like offline venues, to make serious efforts to keep out minors, even if imperfect.