You're both right, and you're both missing the point since you're engaging with their "save the childrun!" smokescreen.

This is about ending anonymity and privacy on the net, plain and simple.

Force the companies to behave, not the populace to be controlled.

This is an extremely ignorant take.

A think-tank is supposed to inform, but an informed decision can only be made if the person making the decision is fully informed.

First of all - we don't know if the think-tank said ONLY that. Maybe it was one ten different things they reported.

Second of all - what was the context of the report? Was it "what do we need to do to ensure that age verification is fool proof?" Or was it "IF we introduce age verification, what are some of the pitfalls we can encounter?"

Stop panicking. The EU operates on democratic principles, and everybody knows well in advance about any votes happening.

EDIT: just read the abstract of the report - yeah, it's a nothingburger. "VPN can be used to bypass age verification" is what it says. Which is a statement of fact. Sure, the language of their tweet is shifty (with a strong push to introducing AV), but who cares? The idea was shot down a couple of times already, and it will be shot down again unless a solution is found that guarantees privacy of users.

Someone from my country created a browser extension that translated clickbait article titles to descriptive titles using LLM. He got sued for copyright infringement by the most clickbaity "news" outlet in Denmark, forcing him to shut down the extension.

Even better if the think tanks had to state their funding sources by human name in the title.

I don't think I'd say "inevitable". Possible, maybe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinternet

The splinternet (also referred to as cyber-balkanization or internet balkanization) is a characterization of the Internet as splintering and dividing due to various factors, such as technology, commerce, politics, nationalism, religion, and divergent national interests. "Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it", wrote the Economist weekly in 2010, arguing it could soon splinter along geographic and commercial boundaries.[1] The Chinese government erected the "Great Firewall" for political reasons, and Russia has enacted the Sovereign Internet Law that allows it to partition itself from the rest of the Internet.[2][3] Other nations, such as the US and Australia, have discussed plans to create a similar firewall to block child pornography or weapon-making instructions.[1]

Clyde Wayne Crews, a researcher at the Cato Institute, first used the term in 2001 to describe his concept of "parallel Internets that would be run as distinct, private, and autonomous universes."[4] The concept itself dates back at least to pair of articles in the journal Science and at the International Conference on Information Systems by Marshall van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson in 1996 and 1997.[5][6] They argued that it the Internet and related technologies "have the potential to fragment interaction and divide groups by leading people to spend more time on special interests and by screening out less preferred contact." They dubbed this effect "cyberbalkanization" and developed a set of formal measures.[7]

Crews used the term in a positive sense, but more recent writers, like Scott Malcomson, a fellow in New America's International Security program, use the term pejoratively to describe a growing threat to the internet's status as a globe-spanning network of networks.[8]

Yes but China, Russia, Iran, etc all have national-level firewalls in place. You can go in China and chances are your VPN won't work, and if it does the whole country is fucking network-hostile (like I've seen reports of the USB charger ports in hotels trying to hack into phones).
UK, as far as I know, doesn't have any kind of similar national level firewall. Nor does USA or most other 'civilized' nations.

And without that national firewall, all these laws are crap. Because unless you're physically prevented by the firewall from downloading or using VPNs or similar tools, all the laws in the world are just a padlock on a cardboard box.

That's true, but the kind of lockdown on the Internet that China does can't be done with just regulation and mandates.

There is an absolutely mind-boggling server infrastructure managing the routing and filtering at every Internet point of entry/exit in China, and it is directly physically filtering traffic headed for consumption by people in China.

Its nickname, "The Great Firewall of China", while hilarious, is an apt analogy for it. They literally built a barrier around their country's Internet borders to keep out unapproved information, and probably Mongols.