People lend phones or computers to kids. The age associated with the user account means absolutely nothing.
Distinguishing between child-locked and unlocked devices is something any website should be able to do easily. Adult-only should be a config setting.
Vendors shouldn't sell unlocked devices to kids.
Then it's up to parents take sure their kids only have locked devices. (Or not, if they're okay with it.)
Apple is horrible in this regard. Their solutions never really work.
A joint venture for an (optional) cross-platform family app would be more than enough. This, plus a (voluntary) content rating that's offered via an API (could even be simple meta data on a webpage). Done.
Oh, there is no config to retrieve, no We API to speak to.
"I'm 18 or older"-button it is. Is that a workable solution?
Ofc as soon as you give your child root access it is over but that is on you
the major players need to allow me to elect one of them as my family manager, and control permissions across ecosystems, from my management portal. i should be able to freely swap apple, google, microsoft, facebook, or a startup as my management and permissions tool.
instead I have a disparate management account and portal for every service on the planet. roblox, fortnite, facebook all want to appear to "make it easy" as if they hold the delusional belief that their management portal is the only one I have to manage. then add a spouse that also wants to change or tinker a setting.
if any law is going to get passed: it should be that any company over a certain size, who adds parental controls, needs to expose them externally to 3rd party management software.
This part is neither necessary nor sufficient.
Put aside the Orwellian premise of "devices are locked by default". People keep making the analogy to things like cigarettes, but if a kid wants a steady supply of cigarettes then they need a steady supplier. If they want an "unlocked device" they just need money and Craigslist, once. It doesn't matter what you make Walmart do and it correspondingly doesn't make any sense to involve them.
If your kids have enough unsupervised money to buy electronics then you're either fine with them being unsupervised or you already have bigger problems than a used laptop.
In person, we expect stores won't sell cigarettes to kids. We should simply expect companies won't provide age restricted services to kids. The liability and requirements should be on those companies.
(Of course adding any level of friction will deter some kids, but needing to get a whole new device other than the one their parents gave them is already a lot of friction, isn't it?)
Don't currently take payments for your business model? Probably what you're doing is anticompetitive and we shouldn't allow it anyway.
That one seems pretty obvious. The point of public indecency laws is so that your family can go to McDonald's and not encounter some couple fornicating on the table. Whereas if you go to a private house where someone lives with a reputation for not being very selective about who they take their clothes off in front of, that's not a public establishment.
A privately owned PC connecting to a privately owned server is a private connection, not a public place. It's something you get by going there. You're not required to go to the frat house.
It doesn't matter if you're not required to go to the frat house. It matters whether the frat house lets the public in while exhibiting their fornication, or has filters at the door.
Stores won’t sell cigarettes to kids because doing that will probably get you arrested and shut down pretty quickly.