I'm afraid you'd get the cookie banner problem but way worse. Everyone that's not Meta/Google/Apple would immediately add a legal CYA "18+" age rating and stop thinking any more about it.
The whole problem with the regulation we have right now is that it assumes the Internet is for kids, and everything for adults must be hidden. When we really just should declare the whole Internet as 18+ and the sites for kids should be the specially marked exceptions.
The argument could be made for banning social media but the whole internet I don’t think it’s the correct approach
Also, Encarta was a thing. Expensive though.
Some states would legislate wikipedia onto the "Adults only" web though because they don't like what it says about things like abortion and trans people.
A lot of ecommerce companies would probably be happy with a locked down adults only internet, because it would kick bot protection up a level, and would require a fairly robust solution to it.
>I believe that event would change it's governance and social structure in a negative way and significantly degrade it as a public resource.
This can and has already been doing even without age verification. We're way beyond government survellaince in many countries.
You traditionally can say one "Fuck" in a PG-13 movie, which will be about brutally displayed murder and violence and how awesome vigilante justice is. But if you have even a couple frames of a single (female, but like, that's its own insane can of worms) nipple, you cannot get lower than an R rating.
This is all well publicized, despite there not being public standards for the process, and the specific wording of the PG-13 advisory is "Some content may be unsuitable for children under 13", which is weird language to describe what actually happens in practice.
This is because the rating system is a weird club of "Parents of children in school" in los angeles. It's about as corruptible and sketchy as a system can get.
The ESRB is similar. Shooting lots of people? Well there's no blood so that can be for everyone. Oh, now you added some red particle effects? Sorry, now it's Mature.
GTA 3 had an M rating, but a person found that if you hacked the game and changed the code you could play a sex minigame. That caused the game to have an Adults Only rating. Even though it's not something you could do, see, or activate in game at all. And also the game already had functionality to have sex with a hooker and then murder them to get your money back.
It exists because the dumbest parents went apeshit over yet another fake controversy (Oh my god, D&D has demons!!!. OH MY GOD. This game about saving teenage girls from creatures in a crazy amount of costume who harm them with a 2 foot long grabby arm because the developers wanted to avoid unfortunate implications is JUST TOO SEXY FOR LITTLE TIMMY and we need to make congress bitch and moan about it for an entire week and ban anything that could ever be entertainment)
They are purposely arbitrary because their purpose is to make the crazy people who write letters to the FTC to arrest someone for daring to have a low cut shirt go the hell away. Those people have absurd and arbitrary triggers.