The Internet post age verification

I know you’re asking for speculation here, but it’s important to know that there are not global age verification laws up for approval. There are 195 countries in the world, and places like South Sudan or Nigeria or Myanmar or Cuba aren’t going to be passing any internet ID laws any time soon.

It also depends on what the laws actually include. Is this just the UK version with ID checks to be on social media or forums? Or full on no more encryption laws “for the children!”? Huge difference.

Even if there’s some huge push for the EU, US, and a few other places to pass internet ID laws, there will be a period of years where plenty of countries don’t have those laws. That could lead to a lot of janky “Ivan’s A-OK Number 1 Data Center” type places to pop up in places that normally wouldn’t be seen as centers of freedom of speech, just to turn a blind eye, quietly scrape data for sale to anyone looking for it, and host sites that are of questionable repute to begin with, possibly leveling up to forums that simply would rather pay extra to ignore every lawsuit if they stay on some AWS server. This has already played out in a way between 2021 and 2024 when a lot of very conservative social media and media sites (Gab, rumble, etc.) looked around for non-US/EU sites to host them.

This would also lead to 95% of people in those places playing nice and ignoring the problems, and then 5% of people doing things like maintaining accounts and VPNs outside of those places and paying with crypto. Assuming that’s also not illegal.

A lot of smaller sites/forums might also follow some very cursory malicious compliance, where you send them a fuzzy picture of “I’m old and my name is Bob” written in cursive on a piece of paper” and accept it as your ID. I might expect Fediverse instances to go this route as well.

My speculative TL;DR: A hodgepodge of messiness on the internet that does very little other than increase friction to escape it for a smaller slice of people willing to put in the effort.