Age verification doesn’t work

It is not like kids/teenager who currently visit the big porn sites like pornhub will say: "Oh I can't, let's read a book instead"

They'll just get it somewhere else, private chatrooms, torrents, etc and from probably even less regulated and more nefarious sources that also serve stuff super hardcore or completely illegal.

But it will be harder for them, the same way it's harder to get alcohol if you don't have a proper ID, and just that will prevent a good number of them of accessing it or at least accessing it in a regular way.

Why aren't there proposals for online age verification to be exactly like alcohol and tobacco?

You can show ID at a real world store and buy an age verification token. The token is good for exactly one user account on one website for one year. The website is responsible for ensuring no account sharing.

No need to store IDs online and it's still pretty hard for kids to access anything we don't want them to. Just like alcohol and tobacco there will be straw purchasers who re-sell to minors, and we accept that imperfection. We also punish people who re-sell or give alcohol to minors.

> Why aren't there proposals for online age verification to be exactly like alcohol and tobacco?

> You can show ID at a real world store and buy an age verification token. The token is good for exactly one user account on one website for one year

I don’t know if you’ve ever bought alcohol or tobacco, either in person or online, but the process in either case, in my experience, does not involve showing government ID at a private business separate from the one you are going to purchase the product from in advance to purchase a single-account, single-year token which you then use to prove age when you purchase the good in question.

I don't crack open the beer in front of the cashier either. That's even illegal in many jurisdictions. I go home and drink it in private, or sometimes with friends. They have literally no way to know if I give it to a minor. But that's considered good enough age verification for a substance that can be lethal if consumed to excess or before driving (which teenagers are allowed to do).

I haven't heard a good explanation for why my proposal is bad other than it's not perfect. Well teenagers sometimes get their hands on beer too and we haven't called for age verification lock technology on beer can tabs yet.

> I haven't heard a good explanation for why my proposal is bad other than it's not perfect.

It has the same flaw as the common age verification laws: it is unnecessarily intrusive; but I wasn’t, in the grandparent post, commenting on the merits, I was commenting on your description of the proposal as being both very different from what is currently being proposed and “just like buying alcohol or tobacco”, since it is nothing like buying alcohol and tobacco and shares the basic features which are different and more intrusive than buying alcohol and tobacco with the common online age verification legislative proposals.