The author or this IEEE Spectrum article argues it's at trade-off between child protection and privacy (for everyone BTW). Not wrong, but I think in many cases discussed at the moment, it's the wrong question to ask. I'd argue that more often than not age verification only alleviates symptoms of a very, very broken system. I.e. maybe protect everyone, not only children, from abusive systems by tearing done the worst offenders and restrict the majority.
Seriously: what is 90% of today's so called social media even doing or for? Ads, opinion control, addictive patterns. That's not a common good, just like smoking wasn't. But big tobacco managed to keep the discussion far away from the underlying issue (tobacco bad) and around somewhat adjacent issues for decades. Let's not fall for that.
