The relentless pursuit of profit and growth ruins absolutely everything it touches. Capitalist rot.

The factor driving age verification has been laws passed by countries. It’s not private industry forcing it, but government. That comes from people complaining to their legislators that they are unhappy that their kids can see <random thing that they object to> online.

If you want a communist system, fine. But there are far too many users on here who, when faced with virtually anything they don’t like, immediately post a screed complaining about ownership of private industry, when it often has absolutely nothing to do with the actual issue at hand.

EDIT: I’d also add that there are actual solutions if you object to something like this. You can pass a law against biometric-based age validation, which I can certainly understand — that form could be prohibited. You could have some alternative form of age-based validation to be instituted to create a path of least resistance for services, like having government provide and fund a zero-knowledge service to confirm various facts to services like age. In countries which have constitutional law and a higher bar to modify it than lower law, you could pass a constitutional law against any form of age validation (“ageism has no place in our country”) to prevent legislators from easily passing things like age verification laws, which I personally don’t think will fly politically in most places, but it’s at least one theoretical option.