Age verification doesn’t work

It's extremely difficult to get solid evidence of this stuff, as it all happens so slowly it's inseparable from many other gradual forces in society.

Are people getting married and having children less, because porn has undermined their ability to form healthy adult relationships?

Or is it because of a successful campaign against teen pregnancy? A rise in women's education levels making them want to wait to start a family? Contraception and pre-marital sex removing a major incentive to settle down? Society's infantilisation of men, who should put away childish things at a much younger age? A housing crisis and hollowing out of the lower middle class meaning people can't hope to afford a family home until middle age? A preference the man out-earns the woman being incompatible with a world where women out-perform men in education? Fears about the future, like the climate crisis? A decline in religion and traditional family values? The rise of online/app-based dating?

Our main tools for disentangling these influences are, as far as I can tell, vibes and anecdotes.

This was exactly what the German public transport service Mopla did when I registered an account there. It needed to know my name to be able to sell me the personal Deutschlandticket. To verify my identity their web application forwarded me to list of countries, where I selected the Netherlands, and then my bank from the list there. That forwarded me to my bank's digital environment, with the request to share my name with Mopla (and just that one attribute). I then used my bank's auth system to approve sharing that claim.

Simple, transparent, and at no point did Mopla have to do anything with ID cards or AI or whatever.

I would expect systems like this to become more broadly available in the near future. In the EU for sure.

As an under 12y old, my first encounter with porn was as porn paper magazines rolled and stored between the wall and the radiators of my school class. No amount of server side age verification will prevent kids and teenagers from sharing stuff.

As a parent I'd rather pay for access to an ethical porn website that promote pleasure for all parties and safe sex and give access to it to my teenagers than trying at all cost to prevent them from seeing all porn.

Now, the internet is ubiquitous and many kids have access to connected devices at their homes (computers, landline phones) and it's harder to overview their use.

Also, the amount of content and extreme content available has exploded.

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I leave as an exercise for the reader to one-up this argument regarding the introduction of porn magazines themselves, porn drawings once paper became a commodity, as so on, dating all the way back to the first human sculpture (fat woman with giant boobs).