Government-mandated anything is usually not a good answer.
But mandatory age-gating is just bad.
Firstly, it’s bad because there is no objective criteria for what should be hidden behind age-gates.
There can’t be, because it’s not an objective issue; it is, like the question of “obscenity“, entirely subjective and reasonable people will disagree over it.
Unreasonable people will really disagree over it.
But it’s also bad because it’s not, in general, actually about the “gate” part; it’s generally more about the “age” part, and the various platforms that want to add your age to the advertising profile they’re maintaining about you. Having a reliable age on that profile makes it worth way more when they try to rent your eyeballs to the highest bidder.
Which is, frankly, what this whole thing is about.
Users don’t react well to platforms that implement strong age-gates on their own, though weak ones along the lines of “yes, I am 18” buttons on porn sites are generally just clicked without any thought.
But a government-mandated age gate makes the users mad at the government, not the platform.
Which gets the platform the advertising data enrichment they’re after without the normal percentage loss of users.
Which is why these age-attestation and -verification laws were lobbied for by big platform companies.
It is, in fact, a movement with no real constituents other than big platform companies.
Almost no one else wants these laws.
Which frankly should be reason enough to reject anything.
The platforms never have your best interest at heart.
Corporations in general never have your best interests at heart.
There are plenty of other problems with the State-mandated part too.
The State mandating age-gating in software is also:
- unconstitutional burden on software developers’ freedom of speech
- unconstitutional taking of developers’ resources for the State’s use
- unconstitutional burden on everyone’s freedom of speech
- unconstitutional restriction on everyone’s access to speech
It’s just a bad solution, even if the problem it’s trying to address did exist.
Which for the most part it doesn’t.
It’s a bad idea, and makes bad law.
Every corporation that funded or lobbied for it should be shunned.
Every legislator that votes for it and every executive who signs it should be removed from office for being bad at their job.
And everyone involved should feel bad.
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