The most costly part of Identification is the last mile. Paying the employee/cop/etc who asks for your ID and check it.
With digital IDs, there's several players fighting to consume that cost as profit.
Microsoft is a huge player. It is the sole reason windows11 requires a TPM device, so that your windows11 device can be used for identity attestation like an iphone can. (I mean, I don't buy that device bound keys are a valid solution, but i'm not the one being fooled in governments around the world to buy this up)
So, no, microsoft will definitely not by the hero of anything here.
back in my time as an (inadvisably) precociously online kid, the only real age barrier was having a credit card, so i had to beg/borrow/steal my way to someone on irc giving me a shell to a vps, and pay some other rando with a steam gift card to buy a domain then transfer it to my registrar account. and like that, i could start developing a presence in whatever online communities i insinuated myself into by acting mature enough nobody gave my age a second thought. physical realities like divorce and school troubles came and went, but moving and shaking online gave me my most steadfast friends and s/o to this day.
shift the timeframe a couple decades and i would have instead been gated by an id upload. bleak.
That might be simpler. Estimating age with a camera is already common in China. Cameras are cheap, and displays now probably have enough processing power to do it locally.
Will work for TVs, too.
Any solution that cannot be evolved into "we must know who you are before you can access the web" will fail at the gate.
It would probably also be a good idea to find a way to ban gambling mechanics in games because if we recognize casinos as vices that lead to widespread social dysfunction and that children have no business whatsoever interacting with them then it follows that gacha games are very clearly an end run around the spirit of the law.
Or did you have a guard posted at every door at your home?
