The Swiss implementation of eID may be hint that governments may/will take the responsibility to implement and maintain the tech, but the multiple intrusions and lobbying by Palantir and friends in the EU gives me the ick.
The Swiss implementation of eID may be hint that governments may/will take the responsibility to implement and maintain the tech, but the multiple intrusions and lobbying by Palantir and friends in the EU gives me the ick.
The next thing you are going to claim kids from young age shouldn't have fully unlocked smart phones, shouldn't install any app and so on. Where is the end of this? Are you telling me parents should spend more time with kids, heck even be their role models although it is much harder compared to just giving up on them and let the glorious internet and various fashionate toxic tribes raise them? Blasphemy!!!
a lot of safer morons? we all are the 'greater moron' in some area at some point, cmon
but we always will have bad parents. So any legistlation needs to account for that. Otherwise those children with the worst parents have the greater digital abilities/opportunities/misfortunes.
"we should have good parents and can and should safe devices"
"Can have good parents" is implying we control something that we don't. Kids with the worst parents will always be at a disadvantage.
It is not like parents are the only influential figures in a kid's upbringing, they are not the only role models, they should not be the only ones paying attention and guiding kids to adulthood.
Parental control options as they stand are severely lacking. If you add the actively predatory enshittification efforts conducted by seemingly all larges tech companies, you are left either forbidding your kid from accessing anything (this does not work if the kid's friends have access) or allowing far more than you are comfortable with.
Lets take YouTube as an example. As it stands you have the options of YouTube (with both the most wonderful content available on one hand, and toxicity and brain rot shorts on the other) or YouTube Kids - an app with controls that do not work. How about allowing parents to whitelist content and/or creators instead of letting the algorithms run the show?
Spotify is another example. How about letting parents control whether the kid's account is plastered with videos, podcasts and AI slop?
How about your run of the mill browser, letting parents review and allow websites on a case-by-case basis? Maybe my kid is ready for news sites but not Reddit? Maybe 4chan and 8kun are better reserved for the more adventorous adults as opposed to impressionable kids?
I agree that age verification is a bad solution, but what the hell are parents supposed to reach for? It's not like Silicon Valley are stepping up with any real solutions or even propositions to these problems, it is left for - at best clueless - politicians to navigate the problem space.
Raising a kid takes a village.
It’s ridiculous that schools are forcing young children to carry devices for educational work that will also happily serve up brainrot, video games, and porn — with the supposed solution that the parent needs to be watching over their shoulder 24/7. Let’s just give all the kids loaded guns too, and say if anything goes wrong it’s just bad parenting.
But we are in western 21st century, people leave their places of birth for myriad of reasons, some better than others but all equally good for them, given its almost never easy to lose one's roots and just move on one's own.
I am in this category, we have 2 small kids and any family is at least 1000km away, the actually helpful good one more like 1500km (and no its not just a hop on some local planes, rather full day ordeal at minimum). No nanny. We see how kids and grandparents enjoy each other, grandparents have more... mental capacity? to teach them after our long day at work and so on.
But there are reasons we moved, its complex mix of leaving poor corrupted place with higher criminality where kids would struggle to achieve a good life via moral legal work and just good efforts. Not everybody has the luxury to come from background where the only difference is amount of money earned. So you give kids a better start and environment, while giving them much smaller set of role models and people who have time for them outside school.
At the end its our choices and our responsibility to raise them. No phones for a loooong time, and even after that some dumb nokia. They can screw up their lives on their own once adults, we won't contribute there even if it would be tremendously easier lifestyle.
Are you going to sit here and tell me your parents were aware of every time you touched a computer or turned on the TV? They vetted everything you consumed? It was a lot easier back then to do. I bet your parents couldn’t even figure out how to block a single channel on their tv, nor did they likely even try. Most of our parents never did.
It’s much easier to relinquish parental control of media exposure when the system helps you out by moderating the content. But the Internet changed everything. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be as a parent to oversee media exposure for their children nowadays without pulling the plug on social media altogether.
I am more technoligically literate than most of my peers and even I find I spend a lot of time on this problem. My kids aren't even teens yet, it's going to suck to keep up with this.
I'm always unsure what your sort of argument seems to imply. Kids are not property of their parents and the state routinely makes decisions about children's welfare.
And that's the catch-22 imposed on parents. Society wants to lord over the power as if the child is their property but none of the responsibility. Anything that went wrong is the parent's fault. It's always more and more requirements upon the parent, a nearly one way imposition of power where law or society says what you must do but of course you will bear all the costs. But by god you better not morally outrage someone or they'll have CPS up your ass.
It's largely the cheapest kind of concern. The kind where you mete out punishment out of a sense of smug moral superiority, but never lift a hand to help out for the endeavors you advocate for, only to push them into a sort of moral tragedy of the commons.
These laws only mete out punishment for people failing to obey, not actually provide support, it is essentially theatre of pretending to care about children. Theatre by the most evil of people, those that use kids as political props.
Response-ability. The ability to respond. Which you have, if you want it or not, for anything and everything you can respond to.
You see children on the streets getting beat up? Your response-ability. You see someone throwing garbage to the ground? Your response-ability.
What you DO with it, whether you act on it, or you deny to have it, doesn’t matter. It is purely the ability, the capacity to. And not responding is also a response. We typically share response-abilities with others around us who are similarly capable. Ownership doesn’t inherently come with increased response-ability. Power does.
Maybe you are confusing responsibility with (legal) liability?
See also: Duty to rescue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_to_rescue - at least as applied and lived in EU, LatAm, Africa; and some US states on paper
> "fact or condition of being responsible, accountable, or answerable," from 1780s.
and in the mid 1790s it meant "that for which one is responsible; a trust, duty, etc."
i am not sure where you're getting this "ability to respond" idea from. i understand the ideal, it just won't work with humans, unless we go back to being tribal.
The key point in the etymology is "that for which one is responsible" you have to actually be responsible for some "thing" to have any responsibility.
even "Response" comes from re- + Sponsor, which:
> The general sense of "one who binds himself to answer for another and be responsible for his conduct" is by 1670s.
i am not bound by anyone else on this planet, thanks very much.
I don’t consider it to be something that “works” or not, or an ideal, but as fact of reality. The moment you could act on something totally makes it your own responsibility to do so or not. Your action or inaction will have real world consequences. Whether you can or will be held accountable is independent from that, or what framework you apply to evaluate a “good” response.
We don’t have to agree on definitions of words but that’s not the point I’m making here, which is based on reality/fact/capability to react and respond to an external stimulus. And for those (re)actions you and only you are responsible, as a fact of life, whether you want that or not. Which is how those two definitions relate.
have you really, truly, thought this through? There's hundreds if not thousands of things I could act on right now. I'm not responsible for any of them.
is this like a corollary to "being heroic is being selfless and ignoring the consequences" or something? Is it a generalization of "stimulus/response"? "branching multiverses"?
what i am getting at here, is: is this a circular "you have a responsibility because you can act, therefore you can act because there is a responsibility", is it so generalized as to be meaningless? is it just a misrepresentation of "you can only control [are responsible for] your own actions"?
In my eyes, you are! In the classical definition, you will at least have to answer/be held accountable for all of that by your later self. Other people invoke external judges but the internal one is typically the toughest of all.
I am more afraid of the God in me than the god you pray to nightly. —- Jason Molina
Then again, you seem to see it something negative (guilt/blame perhaps), whereas I see it as something that makes me aware of my power, my total sphere of potential influence on the world, and the inherent value of my actions and my existence. To me it is empowering. And for me it’s not about selflessness either, but the opposite. I am responsible to make the best out of my situation, based purely on my own values. It doesn’t get more selfish than that. And again, this is not some moral preaching to me, but simply stating the obvious: Nobody but me is responsible for how I act and how I set my priorities.If you see a child drowning in a pool in front of you and you do not act, are you responsible for not saving it? I say yes. Now, what difference does it make it you see it happening, or just know about it, and you had the power to stop it? Would it make a difference if you closed your eyes, deliberately, to not see the child drowning that you know is right there in front of you, or would you still be responsible for not saving it but rather looking away? Does it change your responsibility whether you look, or you don’t look, or is it rather the knowing that makes a difference? If you think distance makes a difference, does this mean you running away from the drowning child makes you less responsible than looking right at it?
I may have muddied it.
i think i understand what you mean.
Where is that quote from? Scott Adams? I admit that I didn’t read any of his philosophy, and Scott Alexander’s eulogy doesn’t really inspire me to do so.
Y'know what happens instead? Their friends have unfettered access to smartphones, so my nephews see all the idiotic brainrotting shit on youtube shorts anyways. If not at home, they'll see all the crap we're blocking at school from their friends anyways. Hell, they could just go to the library and access the free public computers there if they wanted to! So my sisters who are responsible and do everything correctly, still suffer, and like any reasonable parent don't want to go to the extreme of locking their children up in cages and not letting them outside of the house.
There's a reason we don't legislate alcohol and tobacco sales to the same tune of "Just police your kids 24/7 and keep them under lock and key", we instead realize that we can't (or, shouldn't) supervise kids 24/7 day in and day out, and have society-wide rules that forces everyone to not sell booze to anyone underage.
I think what your sisters are doing is fine—they’re sending a signal to their kids that this stuff isn’t “good” and though they’ll undoubtedly encounter it in the world, they’re now going to be inherently biased a certain way. And that’s kinda the best you can hope for.
Funnily enough that's how I ended up getting drunk the first time, a friend stole some liquor from their parent's liquor cabinet :p We both ended up in a lot of trouble over it, him more than me obviously.
But that's sort of the point as well, if they go down that route then it's easier to catch them and it's easier to punish them for their actions. It's also much more obvious that what they're doing is the wrong thing because it involves a lot of sneaking around, deception and even stealing from your own parents. It makes kids less willing to do it in the first place (unless you're a dumbass like my friend and I).
With something like a smartphone, your parents might not let you have one but every single other kid around you has one, so at that point it only becomes an arbitrary rule that your parents imposed on you, and not a wider rule that everyone has to adhere to. If we treated smartphones for children similarly to how we treat alcohol or tobacco, the parents would have a much easier time enforcing these rules.
> ...they’re now going to be inherently biased a certain way
Or they could go the complete opposite way as well. I mean it's the most common trope/facet of being a kid, that stage of rebellion against your parents and their rules. You still have that with things like alcohol and tobacco of course, but at that point it becomes rebellion against society et al which is a bigger deal and harder hurdle to get over than rebelling against your parents and their rules.
Basically, the chinese, through WTO, managed to utilize corona to show politicians, regardless of color, the enormous power of complete digital control of the population.
Our spineless and incompetent EU politicians thought it very erotic, and are now ramming it down our throats.
I don't really see a way to stop this apart from moving to south america or africa, to a small country with a weak government.
So far. But they’ll keep lobbying and we’ll need to keep fighting.
> What examples of this do you have in recent years (post 2016)?
Digital Omnibus is another.
https://noyb.eu/en/gdpr-omnibus-eu-simplification-far-remove...
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/eu-digit...
This implies that regulation is codified. The clear pattern of EU digital regulation doomerism is generally pointing at shitty proposals which aren't approved and codified in law.
Digital omnibus is another proposal.
If "rammed and rushed laws" is legitimately a widespread issue, you should be able to find a good example of something codified which is not just a proposal?
I'm not saying we don't have to fight. But vocal opposition to proposals which ultimately don't make it into law is the system working exactly as intended.
They can try as often as they want and they only have to win once. We - as in those who don't want this Orwellian monster to be written into law - have to win all the time.
No, it is a one way street and thus creates an imbalance. EU regimes never push new legislation that gives more rights to their citizens, only try to limit them again and again.
> Gay marriage would still be illegal if unpopular ideas couldn't be reraised.
Gay marriage is a good example. It got passed despite being unpopular. In many countries where it was pushed by force from above, from the EU to the national level, it is still unpopular.
> Democracy is a balance, unfortunately you have to put up with fighting against the shit ideas as well as for the good ones.
The issue with democracy as we have it in the EU is the imbalance of power and responsibility. Given the EU regime's decisions in the last few decades, I consider it just a shell to push unpopular and undemocratic decisions to their member states, so lobbyists don't have to bribe everyone, just the EU regime.
> I consider it just a shell to push unpopular and undemocratic decisions to their member states, so lobbyists don't have to bribe everyone, just the EU regime.
Which decisions? GDPR? DMA?
Not an EU directive. This was more a comment about various EU member states, which pushed it against the will of own citizens.
> Which decisions? GDPR? DMA?
Every directive. There was no single directive that had popular support from all member state populations. But the EU regime decides something and boxes it through the EU Commission and then uses the EuGH to force it upon all members.
Examples?
At least some EU regimes and people are against Russian sanctions and Ukraine support, they get bullied until they yield.
Illegal migration: there's no single EU country where the population supports it, yet they all got bullied to accept and support criminal migrants.
Electric cars, CO2, maybe not the majority but many country populations are against it, yet decisions get forced upon every single state.
Now, for every single topic you may say it's an exception, that it must have been like that, but in the end, if the wish of population is ignored on so many levels on so many topics, EU can be seen only as an illegitimate, corrupt regime trying to mess up everything. To the point, that even the Chinese regime feels less invasive, at least they care about the basic needs of the majority of their people.
No? The only country where you can argue the government disagree with the population on the subject is Slovakia, but their government didn't get bullied. Hungary has kept its economic ties to Russia, and even lobbied the EU to remove a few oligarchs from the sanctions list. It is currently vetoing a EU aid package to Ukraine. I don't see it tbh.
If the country refuses to follow a directive, it can. Sometimes the country get fined for it, if a citizen if the country goes to court and the ECJ judge him correct, and often the fine is directed towards improving the issue (France fine on Brittany rivers water quality was directed towards the fund that pay for water treatment plants across Europe). Also the EU let the country the decision on how to implement the directive, and let _a lot_ of leeway (just look at Spain and Portugal energy market)
GDPR is entirely unenforced, it's not worth the paper it's written on, and this is due to lobbying. The situation continues to this day. The DPAs simply throw reports of violations into the trash bin.
It's hilariously transparent - Ireland recently (less than 6 months ago) added a former _Meta lobbyist_ to their DPA board [0].
US Big Tech is now spending a record €151 million per year on lobbying the EU [1], and it's completely implausible to believe they're doing that with 0 RoI. "The number of digital lobbyists has risen from 699 to 890 full-time equivalents (FTEs), surpassing the 720 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). A total of 437 lobbyists now have continuous access to the European Parliament. Three meetings per day: Big Tech held an average of three lobbying meetings a day in the first half of 2025, which speaks volumes about their level of access to EU policymakers." It's impossible that this doesn't influence things.
[0] https://noyb.eu/en/former-meta-lobbyist-named-dpc-commission...
[1] https://corporateeurope.org/en/2025/10/revealed-tech-industr...
The fact that in the UK/EU no reputable company is now sharing data without our explicit opt-in permission suggests you are talking bollocks.
As for disreputable companies.... don't do business with them!
Sorry, what is this "EU regime"? I'm not understanding the logic in your post. The people pushing it are certain elected officials of member nations.
"A loosely federated coalition of separate nations, not one entity" is actually a very good description of what the USA was before the Civil War and would technically need to abide by in order to be Constitutionally valid and legitimate; but alas, we have whatever this world dominating empire is that wraps itself in the branding and stolen identity of the United States of America, a literal antithesis of what the founders created. It is why there has always been such an intense and relentless propaganda effort to demonize "states' rights", the equivalent of which legitimate European sovereign countries and people will likely also face if the plans to the powers that are seeking to conquer the whole planet succeed. You will be told, your "loosely federated coalition of separate nations" have no right to claim sovereignty or what we call "state nullification", i.e., "states' rights" to simply nullify and invalidate any federal law that is a violation of the 10th Amendment of the Constitution, i.e., the right of states to anything not explicitly conferred upon the Federal government.
Actually, you don't even have to wait, there have been several examples already that proved without a shadow of a doubt that EU countries are not only no longer sovereign, i.e., "loosely federated coalition of separate states" when certain states disagree or do not wish to go along/vote for what the unelected body of the EU Commission conjures as legislation. You are just visiting the dungeon until you want to leave and the gate has been shut on you.
(this one: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eudi-regul...)
Firm: Trilligent (APCO Worldwide subsidiary), EU Role: EUR 680K for AI Act, DMA, DSA. US Connection: APCO offices in DC; Meta VP calls them "integrated members of our Meta team".
Firm: White & Case LLP, EU Role: EUR 50-100K. digital markets/services. US Connection: Lead international outside counsel, 70+ lawyer team.
Firm: FTI Consulting Belgium, EU Role: EUR 10-25K. US Connection: Subsidiary of FTI Consulting Inc (NYSE: FCN, HQ Washington DC).
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260314074025/https://www.reddi...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rtd51g/update_i_pul...
This sounds like the mere tip of the iceberg, as it is commented that they maintain two separate networks with no overlap (their age verification lobbying goes through local specialists with no international footprint).
Edit:
https://www.lobbyfacts.eu/datacard/trilligent?rid=5168569461...
Trilligent (APCO Worldwide subsidiary), clients for closed financial year, Jan 2024 - Dec 2024,
- meta platforms ireland limited and its various subsidiaries, 50'000€ - 99'999€: EU Green Deal, EU AI Act, the European strategy for a better internet for kids (BIK+), online safety.
- verifymy limited ( age verification business), 0€ - 10'000€: Digital Services Act; eIDAS Regulation; Strategy for a better Internet for kids (BIK+); EU Artificial Intelligence Act; General Data Protection Regulation.
- user rights gmbh, 0€ - 10'000€: Digital Services Act.
Of course, that defeats the entire point of the exercise.
(my MP is SNP, so I benefit from not being in the two party trap)
There's more money spent in lobbyism in the EU than anywhere else in the world. Lobbyism and downright corruption: like Qatari bribing EU MEPs [1] and police finding 1 million EUR in bills hidden at a MEP's apartment (in this case a bribe to explain publicly that Qatar is a country oh-so-respectful of human rights).
The EU is way more corrupt than the US and in many EU countries there's little private sector compared to the US. In France for example more than 60% of the GDP is public spending and all the big companies are state or partially state-owned or owned by people very close to the state.
And as to american companies bribing EU politicians: it's nothing new. IBM and Microsoft for example are two names everybody in the business knows have been splurging money to buy influence and illegal kickbacks have always been flying. It's just the way things have always been operating. Today you can very likely add Google and Palantir etc. to the list but it's nothing new.
EU politicians are whores. And cheap whores at that: investigative journalists have shown, in the past, the little amount of money that was needed to buy their votes. Most of them go into politics to extract as much taxpayers money as they can for their own benefit. They of course love to get bribes.
Also to try to not get caught, EU politicians voted themselves special powers and it's very difficult for the regular police to enter official EU buildings. I know an police inspector who went and arrested a MEP for possession of child porn: it required a very long procedure, way longer than usual, and the request of special authorization allowing them to enter the EU parliament (or EU commission, don't remember which but I think it was MEP at the EP).
American companies bribing EU politicians should scare you indeed: it's been ongoing since forever.
> The Swiss implementation of eID may be hint that governments may/will take the responsibility
Switzerland is in Europe but it's not in the EU: it's not representative of the insane corruption present in the EU institutions.
https://www.lobbyfacts.eu/datacard/palantir-technologies-inc...
Lobbyists having Palantir as a client:
FTI Consulting Belgium,
https://www.lobbyfacts.eu/datacard/fti-consulting-belgium?ri...
The real driver is as always, ad revenue. This time, advertisers want and need to know a real human is engaging the brand and Meta cannot see any other way in sight to assure this fact save for age verification.
this is just the latest evolution of surveillance capitalism.
The EU has zero knowledge proof age verification systems, e.g. through your bank, which are secure and don't involve sending a copy of your ID and / or face scan to a dodgy US based 3rd party.
We also have to consider that "children" covers anywhere from birth to approximately 18 years old.
It is reasonable to expect a parent or their proxy (e.g. caregivers and teachers) to moderate access to the Internet in the early years. Yet older children and teenagers gradually gain more independence. For example: they are able to go places on their own, get their own phone, etc.. In the physical world, we have laws that recognize this, things like forbidding the sale of alcohol and tobacco to minors. Responsibility is placed on the vendor to check identification when selling such products and the customer's age is suspect. It would be absurd to place responsibility on parents in this case since the most a parent can do is educate their child.
Now I understand the Internet poses problems when it comes to similar transactions. For face to face transactions, appearing old enough is often sufficient (perhaps with a buffer to avoid liability) for access without presenting identification. While it isn't truly anonymous, there are cases where it can be reasonably anonymous. Unfortunately, transactions are mediated by machines on the Internet. You cannot make any assumptions about the other person. Making matters worse: it is extraordinarily difficult to do age verification without disclosing identify information, and to do so in a manner that is easily recorded. Whether that information is provided directly or through a third party is a moot point. It is still being provided.
I don't know how we go about solving this problem, but I do know two things:
- Placing all responsibility into the hands of parents is absurd, and would ultimately prove harmful to adolescents. It is creating a nanny-state where the nanny is the parent. The youth would be unable to gradually gain independence, nor develop an identity independent of their parents' whims.
- We live in a world which is eager to age-gate things that should not be. Sometimes this is for semi-legitimate reasons due to how the Internet is structured. For example: there is no good reasons why children and youth cannot participate in things like discussion forums, but those forums definitely cannot look like the "social media" we have today. Other times it is for despicable reasons, such as making value based judgements based upon ideology. (The left and right are both guilty of this.)
Nonsense. What kind of nanny state? Of course parent is a nanny because they growing and taking care of their own children. This has been for this way for centuries. Nanny state is the oppposite when state is reponsible for growing your kids.
You didn't explain how "Placing all responsibility into the hands of parents is absurd," or how "would ultimately prove harmful to adolescents".
> It is reasonable to expect a parent or their proxy (e.g. caregivers and teachers) to moderate access to the Internet in the early years. Yet older children and teenagers gradually gain more independence.
its easy to moderate or at least limit access to internet for kids. - less than 5 years then have no own phone - less than 10 years most likely also don't have own phone if have don't need sim but only wifi (parent control wifi and router) - more than 15 years -> no control anyway and this age limitation trying not to limit above 15 years in most countries anyway - between 10-15 you can just not sell simcards for those ages less than 15. Parents decide if will buy such simcard for their kids. Allow buy kid like simcard that restrict access to social media. You need unrestricted simcard that you can get only if you are >15 years old or your parent will buy for you. Sure it wont restrict everything but will limit access significantly
Other solutios are treating flu with HIV.
Or even kids whose parents don't have the technical knowledge needed
Yes I do agree the responsibility is with the parents, but it's these kids who are majoritarily affected by (bad internet actors) AND (bad offline actors)
If they are having sex with people they shouldn't, you've just been a bad parent
What you’re proposing is similar to a “Google Free Village.” What we need is something that lets parents have some control by proxy without violating the privacy of the child or anyone else. I believe it’s possible to do so.
The Internet that we grew up on has been totally subsumed by scumbag marketing to the point that it’s unavoidable. It’s an addictive substance now. Stop pretending like the ways of the 90’s and 2000’s are still accessible.
In many places it is essentially impossible for children (even younger than 13) to have a normal social live without access to a smart phone. Just some examples, many public transport providers are moving to apps as the only way to pay for fares, nearly all communication for sports clubs happens through messenger platforms, school information is typically distributed via apps as well and the list goes on (I have not even touched on the kids own social interactions).
The irony is that the people who say "parents should parent their kids online activities" the loudest, largely grew up with unrestricted computer use, in chat rooms, weird corners of the internet all by working around any restrictions that parents tried to put on them. Mainly because they were much more computer literate then the older generation.
Isis did manage to recruit young men in the UK via telegram (OK, you just said “in all likelihood“, maybe I’m tossing you the exception that proves the rule)
> Isis did manage to recruit young men in the UK via telegram
Not sure why this is an age problem, and why it's ok for 18 year olds to be recruited to terrorist organisations but not 17 year olds...
A proper society raises their new generations.
Yes, rights and responsibilities fall mostly to parents, but I see no reason to make licentious activities difficult for parents to inhibit.
What is it you want to do on the internet?
We can have systems that allow anonymity (between client and server), but still put hardcore porn, gore, financial frauds and such out of reach of those without proof they're over 18.
Now, don't get me wrong, Palantir and it's ilk are a danger to society. But just because the military-industrial complex wants to use any excuse to control people, doesn't mean all of those excuses are wrong.
If we really embraced this logic, then should we look at returning to the laws from before the 'protect the children' push of the 20th century. Compare this to some countries where kids can go buy beer. I've read stories from people in less regulated countries who use to buy beer for their parents when they were underage, and nothing was stopping them from buying it from themselves if their parents allowed it (or failed to stop it). Even a concept like child labor, why should we regulate that out to companies to control instead of depending upon parents to parent? When you consider web access as a person having some sort of transaction with a company, it generalizes to a very similar position of if a parent or the government should monitor that relationship for harm.
The same way, keeping driver license behind an age gate is unnecessary, parents should parents! I was driving tractors at 12yo, why couldn't I drive a car?
Parents should be the one responsible if they give money or a car to their kid
All of the systems I'm aware of rely on someplace your ID is already stored.
No, they don't. And they can't.
As it stands one should be happy if Meta catches most calls for the extermination of an ethnicity on its platform, that they would provide capabilities that allows a kid to protect themselves from bullying or grooming is just unimaginable.