It’s better but the only place the word verification, or anything like it, actually appears in the text is in the title and in the introduction. It doesn’t have any verification in it, just passing whatever you tell your device to other systems it interacts with.

I wish the politicians were honest about what it does. Accepting this makes it seem like we’re ok with verification because that’s what’s in the title, but it’s possible to be both supportive of requiring some type of standard parental control system and be against any sort of age verification.

Think about how much it must take for parents to set up age controls on every single individual app and service their kids use. Having the ability to set up an account for your child on their phone or laptop and know that appropriate controls for that age range will be automatically applied will make it so many more parents will do so than they do now.

This is a good thing because we don’t want what they’ve got in the UK, which is requiring this patchwork of age verification from websites and apps to avoid liability. We want it to be the responsibility of parents, so that we as adults can once again browse freely and no longer be asked to input our birthday to “verify” we are old enough to see a list of beers the local brewery has on tap.