I’m not opposed to age-gating at all, I think it’s appropriate in many situations and useful, and democratic societies can decide their own rules there. But it should be handled and authenticated as low-level as possible, at the operating system layer.
See also: Australia’s Senate bans social media for kids under 16. But there are lots of other less controversial examples, like adult websites, or ordering alcohol online or through an app.
100% should ban porn. That’s not about freedom of speech or expression in my mind. I think the world will be better place.
I’m in two minds. Technically, low-level age-gating makes a lot of sense. You can imagine a theoretical API that would allow eg a website or app to ask (with your permission, like when it wants access to your location or filesystem) your operating system to return a signed message verifying your age is in excess of some value or another, without exposing anything personally-identifiable.
But such a suggestion immediately runs up against the issue of local trust. How can the operating system be trusted? Either the feature only works on closed source operating systems with signed bootloaders, and it’s something like HDCP in its implementation… which is just horrible (and opens many more questions, and still will never be completely effective). Or else it has to be trivially open to abuse (if I were 15 again, I’d absolutely be up for running a VM of an OS patched to claim I was whatever age I fancy… and that’s assuming I didn’t have an easier option like just guessing a parent’s password).
Kids are really good at circumventing age-gating. And whether that’s dressing-older to get into bars or clicking the “yes, I’m 18+” button on a website, or the more sophisticated variants of fake IDs and CC generators, they’re already doing it and will continue to do so. We can and should make it harder for them to bring themselves to harm, but we can’t lull ourselves into a false sense of security by pretending that this is purely a technological issue. I speak as somebody who as a minor used all of the above methods and more, and as a parent who wants their children to be safer online than I was.