Buried inside the KIDS Act are provisions that will push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation policies for online speech, and even create new rules about private and encrypted communications. While supporters continue to claim this bill protects minors online, its requirements come at the expense of privacy, free expression, and the ability of people of all ages to use the internet without revealing sensitive data.
They’ve been trying to pull some form of this since the 90s. It has been resoundingly rejected every time, but this time they’ve got big tech on their side, and they’ve got the technical means in place to pull it off now.
AI created the perfect storm. Big tech previously profited somewhat from people being more comfortable doing certain things online in private anonymity. But now the ad impressions are worthless because of AI bots, the scrapers are banging down the doors of everything and driving up hosting costs, and the only way other than murdering the AI industry to stop this is forced human identification so yes I fear we are quite screwed.