I want to go back

If it makes you feel better, this isn't the first time and it won't be the last.

Because these regulations never do.

Since the earliest days of the internet, governments have been scheming to gain control over the dissemination of content - to have authority over what people can and cannot see.

Autocracies like Russia, China and North Korea simply established censorships regimes, but the best that western governments have generally been able to do is ban content that is illegal in and of itself, like child porn. Their goal, all along, has been to establish systems by which to censor content that is not in and of itself illegal.

This is the most success they've had yet.

I'll make my own internet... with blackjack

I still remember when social networks tried to impose a real name requirement.

Check out the book the master switch. This is just all parts of the wheel.

It is not age verification.

It is privacy invading, morality policing, de-anonymizing, state surveillance.

Nothing less.

PS. If you want to download a video from a site that doesn't have a download button, use the Inspect feature (right click on the page, not the video, and click inspect)

Sort by size. Reload page. Find the video. Open the video in new tab. It will be just the video. Right click and save as, or click the download button, or click the 3 dot menu button and select download.

On Firefox you can often bypass this entirely by shift + right click. And should see a save video as option. If not, the inspect feature works the same.

For hls/TS videos (m3u8 streams), if you reallllly want, you can copy the link for the stream and use VLC to convert the stream to a file.

This also often lets you download at higher resolution than they offer to download.

Yes, I porn.

No hookers?

but i want to protect my kids from the sin of gambling how dare you try to bypass my protection

They haven't verified that they're old enough for those.

How would one do this on a mobile browser?

a global wave of age-check laws threatens to chill speech

You’ve read your last free article.

Shout out to yt-dlp, the absolute unit of software beneath lots of media scraping tools.

You can also use MPV Video player, should be able to play many URLs you throw at it.

That's responsible

Note: this isn't free but I use 1DM+. It has it's own browser that filters out the videos for download. It won't work with YouTube and a bunch of other websites because Google acts like a little bitch to the developer.

If that's been their goal for decades then there would be something written down to that effect. Policy statements, press releases, meeting minutes.... Got anything?

Its easier to just sail the torrential high seas and get that 4k h265 quality shit that sites keep for paying members only. Once you know the models name its easy to get their entire collection.

I professionally pron too.

They are allowed to chill their own speech. The government does not have the right to restrict speech, at least in the US.

I'll take that bet. Probably won't be effective, but I'm betting this shit is here to stay. There already hasn't been enough push-back.

All the big adult sites will probably just die or at least shrivel in popularity. Most Europeans simply will not use whatever "tell Brussels or London where or what what you are watching" option is. In the place of the big sites there will be a billion shady and likely virus-lottery proxy sites whose only selling point is that they do not do age checking or require registration. Those then get occasionally smacked down by Brussels, just to be replaced with 10 more clones the by the next week. On the side piracy and vpns will thrive. Kids will not be protected nor will people's privacy, quality will be worse.

I would also bet that when the landscape decentralizes there will be a lot more cp, revenge and peep-videos and other illegal shit in the mix that will get through through the cracks since massive established sites had to actually fear shutdown and losing all revenue unless they had robust gatekeeping mechanisms. If Brussels wants your 2 month life-expectancy site dead anyway, because of it's only selling point of having to show id, then why really bother with the quality control of the material. Especially if site holder has no personal qualms about that stuff.