Well where’s your truck bomb, tough guy?

Obvious fed is obvious.

We’re talking the goal. Actually implementing it successfully is another matter entirely.

You need to be thinking beyond just this law. Once you make it mandatory for all sites to use age verification, you then pass other laws to patch the holes in the system. Look at the DMCA. They made it a felony to bypass copyright restriction technology. They could write a law making it a felony to bypass age verification tools, even if you yourself are over 18. Just like it’s currently a felony to use technology to bypass copyright protection tools, even for media that you’ve legally purchased.

It’s more about ad revenue. Advertisers don’t want to pay for bots to read their ads.

I’m reminded of the Foundation in Asimov’s Foundation series. The Foundation was deliberately banished to a remote world scarce in metals and other industrially necessary materials. Instead of choking them off, it forced them to innovate. The giant galactic Empire never had to be efficient, they could afford to build fleets of huge resource hungry vessels. The Foundation had to learn to miniaturize numerous technologies so they could be built with fewer raw materials. And that ultimately put them at a huge technological advantage.