The problem is that not all parents are "concerned parents" and children dont deserve to be taken advantage of by trillion dollar corporations for the crime of having bad parents.
At any rate, with age verification, un-concerned parent will likely just want their kid to shut up, and will verify using their own details to give the kid the (adult) access they want. So I don't think that changes much here.
Well, no, this is the slightly different classic question of whether, in order to prevent (or, more realistically, on the pretext of preventing) bad parenting, the state should impose a universal totalotarian papers-please approach to basic life activities which requires everyone to prove identity to refute the assumption that they are a child so that it may impose its own (also bad, because totally one-size-fits-all and corcumstance blind) parenting on every child, without regard to the imposition on the liberty of every adult necessary to do so.
Stepping in to correct bad parenting happens when there is a system to identify bad parenting requiring correction and intervene only where such is identified, not when you are imposing a universal regime on everyone on the justification that without it, some will act as bad parents. While both are approaches frequently proposed, they are different and should be distinguished.
Now that the 70-ish year experiment is over, we’re simply reverting to the way we’ve been since time immemorial.
The timeline you present is backwards because you misunderstand privacy as a binary. For most of human history we were extremely private to almost everybody in the world, and that's only changed relatively recently. There's a huge difference between my family or close neighbors knowing what I'm doing because of physical proximity and having to broadcast information about myself in order to take part in the way society has evolved to expect for mundane services.
- at a medium, you will have annoying and intrusive identity checks required to use many common websites
- at a high medium, you will not be able to use a non trusted computer and identity stack: get on a windows, apple, or google device and use their identity services in their browsers, or else you cannot use the internet
- at a maximum, all activity you and everyone takes online will be monitored and faithfully tied to your or their verified identity. This total loss of privacy will result in a total loss of freedom of speech and assembly online.
That last point is the direct aim of the people driving these laws.
No system is going to fix "unresponsble" parents until we end up with a state completely replacing parent like in Brave New World.
You’re the person saying that we shouldn’t be default people to contributing to their retirement because people may choose not to. It’s not about perfectly capturing every possible person - you’re running a country, not a concentration camp.
Unfortunately, this doesn't address that problem.