Anonymity No More? Age Checks Come to the Web

Presumably when these age check systems fail, governments will be able to justify a system which assigns each computing device a registered owner.

You'll have to initiate a video call with a government employee, hold up your photo ID and say your name, and then the app will download a digital certificate to be stored in your device's TPM chip.

From then on, you'll have to use that certificate every time you are issued an IP address by an ISP, and the ISPs will keep a log connecting each IP address (and time period) with the ID baked into the certificate (which will be a passport / driving licence / national ID card / immigrant visa number).

Perhaps the protocol between the device and the ISP will be zero-knowledge, so the ISP never sees your ID, they just know you've been issued one, and the value they store is blinded with a government public-key, so that the government can unblind it after subpoenaing it from the ISP.

Expect Apple (and I assume the rest) to implement some kind of age verification where you provide your info to them and they vouch for you. This is a great way to ensure that desirable content is only available to people who have given their personal information to Apple or whoever, and will only strengthen existing monopolies / oligopolies

this is exactly the thing we need to get users to stay away in droves, and/or find age proxies