> Many of the worst present on the internet is not age gated at all, you have millions of porn websites without even a "are you over 18" popup. There are plethora of toxic forums...

This is what I find most insane about the UK's age verification law. It's literally so easy to find adult content without proving your age... You can literally just type in "naked women" into a search engine and get porn...

To call it ineffective would be an understatement. Finding adult content on the web almost just as easy as it's always been. The only thing it's made harder is accessing adult content from the normie-web – you can't access porn on places like Reddit anymore, but you can access porn on 4chan and other dodgy adult sites.

If the argument is "think about the kids" there are more effective ways to do it... Requiring device-level filtering for example would likely be more effective because it could just blacklist domains with hosting adult content unless unrestricted. It would also put more power in the parents hands about what is and what isn't restrict.