That sounds like a very functional and rational solution to the problem of age verification. But age verification isn't the ultimate goal, it's mass surveillance, which your solution doesn't work for.

ActivityPub is a major threat to the commercial social networks.

These laws are purely a way to regulate communication, but they are effectively a way to prevent new social networks from becoming established.

This is why the really big social networks are welcoming them with open arms. Even the criminal social networks are secretly pleased with them.

Laws only affect people too poor to manipulate them and too honest to disobey them.

Because it's not actually about age verification, it's about totalizing surveillance of everyone.

Age check happens via trusted entity (your government)

Bold of you to assume a government entity is trusted. In the UK we have a large misrepresentative error due to our voting system.

The problem is that meat-space logic is applied to the cyberspace (as it might have been said in the 90ies).

You go into a store and the clerk sees you and knows your age. If it's borderline, then they ask for ID. They are applying that thinking to internet services. And so are you. You are just trying to figure out a better way to ask for ID.

The UK doesn't have a system of mandatory national ID. Brits feel that that is totalitarian. So obviously, they do not use the scheme you propose. It's not their meat-space logic.

Where this falls down is that no ordinary Mastodon instance can comply with the regulations of the close to 200 hundred countries in the world. Of course, just like 4chan, many wouldn't want to out of principle.

The only way to make this work is to introduce another meat-space thing: Border posts. You need a Great Firewall of the [Local Nation]. At physical border posts, guards check if goods comply with local regulations. We need virtual border posts to check if data is imported and exported in compliance with local regulations.

Such a thing, a virtual Schengen border, was briefly considered in the EU about 15 years ago. It went nowhere at the time. But if you look at EU regulations, you can see that the foundations are already laid, most obviously with the GDPR but also the DSM, DMA, DSA, CRA, ...

Eventually, the border will be closed to protect our values; to enforce our laws. We will lock out those American and Chinese Big Tech companies that steal our data. We will only allow their European branches and strictly monitor their communications abroad. We will be taking back control, as the Brexiteers sloganized it. Freedom is just another word for having to ask the government for permission when you enter a country. And increasingly, it is another word for having to ask permission for how you use your own computer.

It won't be some shady backroom deal. Look here. People in this community love these regulations. Europeans here are happy to tell US companies to "FO if they don't want to follow our laws". Well, the Great Firewall of Europe is how you do that.

How about people parent their children?

I believe the issue is that parents themselves are overworked from their job and have no energy to be a parent, because in our society, it is more successful to be a worker than to be a parent.

(Sorry for turning it into a critique of capitalism, I just can't help it these days)

It was never about the kids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_disclosures

I think this starts to not work when you start to include other states that want to do this, other countries, cities, counties, etc.. How many trusted authorities should there be and how do you prevent them from being compromised and exploited to falsely verify people? How do you prevent valid certs from being sold?

Some examples of the type of service you mentioned:

• https://www.realme.govt.nz/
• https://id.me/

It does not contain a reference to your identity.

but they know who they issued it to, and can secretly subpoena your data from your instance.

no thank you.

This can be improved even further to lock a single age verification to a single account. Instead of issuing you a generic signed cert, they use blinded signatures to sign a cert that you generate and encrypt, containing the domain name and your username. The govt never sees the site or your username, because it's encrypted, and the site never sees the document you provided the govt with to prove your age. But you have a cert that can only be used by you to verify your account is of age.

There's an alternative solution that would enable a person's browser or device to verify their age based on a govt-signed cert with repeated hashes. This would have the benefit of the government not even knowing how many verifications you had done, because they only provide one cert per person (with longer renewals. The downside of this is that it requires some form of unique multiple-use identifier. In the sample question that's fine because it's a passport. IRL it could be something like an email address, or even just your own unique UUID.

I’m so so very tired of being right.

Yes. I had always worried about the copyright industry. That was the big money pushing for censorship. Controlling access and exchange of information is part of their business model and even personal ideology. But I don't know how much this has actually to do with them, and how much is simply the will to power.

What I did not see coming at all was how the left would completely 180 on these issues. That, at least, I blame on the copyright industry.

Right wing people have screeched about "the intolerant left" forever, but I always ignored the obvious hypocrisy. I took it as a debate on what is permissible in polite society. But now Europe is at a point where there is simply a consensus against free speech. Only the most illiberal forces will be able to use these legal weapons to full effect. That will be the extreme right.

That's far too many words for them to properly understand

Yes but that would require them to regard all children as being worthy of protection by the law.

They don't.

It's almost like this law was made to preserve the Meta monopoly. Starting a social media platform just got more expensive and complicated.

What gets me is how many people in this very community have the same level of ignorance. And on top of that, they don't understand that these laws also apply to the very service they are using.

Protect Jeffrey Epstein? Last I checked, he doesn't need anymore "protecting".

Trump only cares about himself. If he accidentally "protected" anyone but himself, it's purely a coincidence.

That means being paid by the tax payers.

The free option is to trust your children.