Obviously emotive reason for an outright erosion of personal liberty and freedom, shocked Pikachu is shocked

You mean sharing their real identity with online companies who will sell and/or lose it to hackers doesn't make children sAfE oNLinE??!!?!11?!

It will make kids really good at bypassing the restrictions that get put in place, which will probably require them to go to some of the shadier places on the web, which could put them in more danger.

The people who made these rules don't understand the fundamental rule of the internet: any online restriction put in place, can be overcome with tools and knowledge that are also readily available on the Internet

Prob should double down the efforts rather than scrap it then right?

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it” John Gilmore

I saw an interesting video suggesting that the real motivation is to give megacorps like Google a new business acting as "banks" for identity, i.e. the Internet would get so inconvenient that people would just save their identity with Google (or Meta, etc) and then use them to log in to other websites.

I probably explained it badly, but the video I saw is here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAd-OOrdyMw

People in the comments pointed out that those companies would also have the ability to delete or suspend your identity verification if you did something they didn't like (or refused to do something they wanted). Reminds me of the SIN from Shadowrun .

Indeed. Anybody but the biggies will have an impossible task trying to convince people to verify their ID, so all the smaller sites will switch to only allowing registration/sign-in through Google/Apple/MS's Oauth, and depreciate the username/password option. When "signing in with Google/whatever", Google will simply pass a flag "adult" along with authorizing. In the end, they become the gatekeepers for the whole web, collecting tremendous valuable data in the process and gaining even more power over your identity.

Always keep in mind that the small players will always take the easiest option, and the big players want more control.

Internet monitoring should fall to the parents. When the government parents, they parent everyone and abuse their power.

There are tons of products to prevent access to apps and websites. If all else pass a law so users opt-in to restricted internet access.

This isn't the motivation in Europe where there's a deep skepticism about those - all foreign - companies.

There is no need for conspiracy-type thinking. "Think of the children" has always been a powerful and real motivating force, not just a cover for nefarious other stuff. You need to recognise that, even if it's wrong-headed.

Well, who'd have thought.

Makes identity theft much more likely though

It being a real and powerful motivational force means it's one of the more useful covers.

Just because it motivates the voters/customers doesn't mean it's the genuine reason behind a decision.

I cannot think of a single recent "think of the children" based action that was intended to and actually helped the children in a meaningful way.

Can you?