In most of Europe (spoiler: overgeneralization incoming) nobody would have an issue with a child walking alone through a city, going into a bar and ordering a coke. Nobody is going to stop them from taking public transit to a book store, and nothing is legally or physically preventing them from looking at a couple pages in the latest playboy issue in the magazine rack. Though the clerk might interfere out of his own judgement, and depending on the country they might check your age before selling it. You will however be asked for ID before being allowed in a strip club, brothel or casino, or before being sold a DVD of some action movie.
The action movie too? I’ve never seen that happen, and I’m certain I rented a whole bunch of age inappropriate DVD’s (or was it VCR’s?) back in the day. Maybe we were required to be ID’ed and the teenager behind the counter just gave zero fucks?
One time my parents got me in. They had made a deal with the owner that I'd be shielded by a parent from seeing anything in the store on my way to the small corner of "age appropriate" VHSs, so that I could pick out what I wanted and then I'd have to leave the store while my parents went to rent it, coz from the cashier's counter I'd see too much.
Of course today I understand but back then I was just like "WTF!, why not!?"
Funny to think about now. It was a tiny corner I could see and a huuuuuge store I wasn't allowed in.
I still have not watched Johnny Pneumonic.
Yeah, but the bar bouncer doesn't keep a registry of a million different customers and profit from selling my info.
I wonder if there could be some sort of NFC/USB Yubikey thingy that resides in your government-issued ID that responds with TRUE if the person is considered an adult. Ideally, it would just leak your nationality (the "is_adult=true" response would be digitally signed by your government at ID-issuing time).
As a gay man, I am profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of one or more private companies having a durable record of the content I look at, for what I would hope are obvious historical reasons. Additionally, age-gate laws will inevitably be used for oppressive purposes - remember, a substantial number of conservatives view ANY mention of the mere existence of LGBT people or families as inherently pornographic, sexual, or obscene, and those people would absolutely seek to have all LGBT content age-gated. Hell, even without such laws we see this in libraries and schools. The harm that would be averted from age verification online is not proportional to the evils it would give rise to, plain and simple.
The only form of age verification I would ever be OK with would be on the same basis as being carded in RL - something like, at a corner store I could buy a tag with an ID number on it that would count as proof of age for as long as I had it, for online purposes. The clerk would verify my age and then give me a tag in a sealed box with a random number, thus preserving my anonymity from both angles: the clerk would not know what number he sold me, and the state would not know who bought the number, only that the retailer averred that I had had my age verified.
In Europe, my ex and our two teen daughters could go out in the late evening and feel comfortable socializing in places that would be unthinkable in the US.
In general, US culture seems to stratify people by ages in all sorts of ways, official and just cultural. It doesn't feel as socially healthy to me. We are all better for having a wide variety of friends and family around us.
Internet came out of military and academia and had a flat namespace. No consideraton whatsoever was given to the idea of a 'social model' for it. This was discussed way back in late '90s in a yahoo group that has since disappeared: social models for communication networks.