> Rather than age-gating technologies like VPNs, we believe that regulators should address the root causes of online harm by holding platforms to account
Honest question: if you tell Pornhub "now you will be fined heavily if you let 10-year old kids access porn", won't Pornhub implement some kind of age verification?
How else would the platform "address the root cause"?
Age gating the VPN age gates (pseudo-anonymous) access to 100% of the content on the internet. Regardless of whether or not you agree with it, age gating only the porn subset of the internet is a much smaller restriction.
You're asking if verified user accounts on a porn site are more or less invasive than the government banning or restricting access to VPNs?
The easiest, and the fairest way in my opinion, is to realize parents can and should be responsible for what their children read. Just like you wouldn't give your kid access to your BDSM porn magazines from the 80s, you shouldn't let him online without supervision.
Other than that, there is no "online harm". No root cause of anything that would need to be addressed, no problems whatsoever. It's just information passing through from one person to another.
Laws like age verification will just push kids to even weirder corners of the internet. When will 4chan or motherless implement age verification? On pornhub you see vanilla porn on the front page. On 4chan or motherless you see CP (AI, but still), (fake) rape or (fake) murders. And there are many more sites like those.