The only way to have age verification on an international level, is to have treaties allowing for the sharing of information about citizens, digitally, in that context.

And this is that level of cooperation. And it has all the hallmarks of what comes next, identity verification. And this, is what this is for.

In order to prosecute anyone, you need to validate who did the crime. And that requires knowing who that person is. Not hearsay, not postulated, but validated "who this is". So you need to lock down anonymous access to the internet, in order to ensure you can easily and always prosecute such crimes.

And one of the issues right now, is that if someone in the UK does "bad thing" in Canada via the internet? It's doubly hard to track. So creating frameworks which will (on the backend) require some form of identity verification to work effectively, well... that tracks from where I sit and have seen in the last 2 years.

Frankly, from a government's perspective, this is no different than all the changes with KYC, for example 50 years ago the Government of Canada knew pretty much nothing about its citizenry. Certainly, it had no clue about bank account balances, transactions, investment holdings, a person's wealth and more. Now it knows enormous amounts of data, perhaps an arbitrary example is that your RRSP and TFSA(like American 501k) information, balances, and more are now yearly sent to the GoC. I believe also all information on trades made are, too, even in non-registered accounts. This absolutely wasn't the case, not to this degree, even a decade or two ago.

Some of these obligations are via ratified international treaties. The degree of surveillance, fiscally, is astonishing now. Americans know of this of course, after 9/11 they gave their government enormous data, and keep giving it, eg credit card transactions.

I remember when I was young, my parents arguing about having to get SIN cards (social insurance number). While it as introduced in the 60s, something happened which made it more of a requirement. Its only purpose at the time was for Revenue Canada to track info. Everyone argued about it, discussed it, was upset! It was the first time people needed "a number" to open certain bank accounts.

Yet we come from that, to this in really one generation's lifetime.

One of the problems is that, there is a massive, immense, enormous problem here right now, in terms of bots/foreign actors/asshats spreading immense disinformation for profit or state actor based goals. And with LLMs, it's going to get so much worse. People on HN at least are capable of some filtering, but the average Joe just sees video and 100% believes it is factual and true.

I wish I could see another path to locking out the asshattery, whilst keeping the internet anonymous. But I don't really. And unless a grass roots movement comes around, to ensure that every crime on the internet has a very high degree of success for prosecution? Then we'll be getting an identity managed internet.

I'm sure a lot of people will say "We can force companies to filter!", well, can you? For every forum out there? For torrents? For everything? And even if you think the "big boys" can be the main filter points, well, do you want a private company to decide what you post or not? And they'll need some way to ensure people don't just create a new account when banned! So they'll want ID too, if they're legislated to filter.

And if they're legislated to filter, can you fight decisions in court? Do you have the presumption on innocence? Do you have the right to face your accusers? A jury of your peers? With Google, Facebook, anyone these days, you get banned and it's nigh impossible to even find out why.

While there are exceptions, our governments are required to have criminal courts, and things prosecuted there.

I really don't want private, fiscally motivated companies to be the gatekeepers, if gatekeepers there must be.

Ah well. This is all a very unpleasant path.

A Surveillance Treaty in Disguise: Canada Signs UN Cybercrime Convention