Step 2, demand compliance.
Step 3, upon not hearing of compliance, levy fines.
Step 4, upon non payment of fines, declare in breach of (2).
Step 5, block site from UK using DNS, in the same manner as torrent sites etc.
5 was always the goal, 2 to 4 are largely just performative.
The UK government has lost control of what happen in the physical world on their own island so now the bureaucrats play a fantasy game where they are gonna enforce their rules and dominion in their former colonies or the digital world.
So why don't they mandate their ISP to implement this as an optional feature ?
Why do they instead try to boil the ocean by going after every website on the planet and outside of their jurisdiction?
The correct solution (in addition to bill layer control and arguably compulsory support for an “over 18” tag in dns which would be easy enough to implement for the same sites that currently demand over 18s, would be to help parents utilise parental controls (having recently been through it with Minecraft and fortnight it was a nightmarish gordian knot.
The hand wringing about how evil vpns are is the same. My son can’t install mullvad or whatever on his phone without my approval thanks to apple’s parental controls. I assume android has the same.
The goal has never been to empower parents though
For example, if you have a stack of explicit DVDs and it becomes apparent that your child has access to them, then you will likely get a visit from social services and potentially suffer legal consequences up to and including removal of custody. I honestly have no idea why stuff on the internet is treated differently. Internet providers are already required to check that you are over 18 (much as the person selling you those DVDs is) - if you then share the content that this makes available with a child, then you should be held responsible in the same way. It was sufficient with print, VHS, Sky TV, etc. - why not the internet?
Incorrect. Source: I had a checking account before I was 18.