The second i have to hand over my id to a tech company is the second i leave and never come back.
Also how they gonna manage the fediverse? Can someone get fined for providing social media to themselves if an under 16 sets up their own federated instance?
In my country they talked about this. And they thought of a different approach.
The government were to emit anonymous digital certificates after validate your identity. And then the websites were only required to validate these anonymous digital certificates.
Or even it was talk that the government could put a certificate validation in front of the affected ip.
So the bussiness won't have your ip. Only a verification by the government that you are indeed over certain age.
This kind of control tend to be ip based, like cookies in the eu. So if they don't know they won't know. And if they know means that they knew. Nothing changes on that regard.
That depends on the law. For example, it's possible that the US could require Meta to verify ages regardless of nationality, so you the EU (for example) would be subject to it.
I'm not saying that's how any of these laws work, I'm merely saying that it's possible. If enough people sidestep the law by using a VPN, I could countries use a heavier hand (e.g. verify everyone or don't do business here).
I will always oppose these types of laws. I set up my WiFi to connect over a VPN to the next state over because my state has ID laws for porn and social media. It's annoying and increases latency a bit (only like 10ms), so I'll oppose them even if I can sidestep them.