Do not for a split second operate under the assumption that there aren't coordinating forces working on this. I know this trips the "conspiracy theories!!1!" flag in most people, but you can literally come up with organizations dedicated to things like this in mere seconds of googling. Here's a comment about US state-level coordination I made earlier, with a challenge to produce some examples that I then produced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47065492
It happens at the national level too. I just did a simple Google search for "united nations committee to harmonize" [1] (no quotes in my search itself) and I count 5 or 6 committees explicitly dedicated to "harmonization" in the first ten results. And that's just the committees, you can count on each of them to have factions within (because politics, politics never changes) and outside forces competing and vying to get the "harmonizations" to favor them and disfavor their competitors. And as politics, politics never changes, paging Ron Perlman, these harmonization committees are unlikely to flinch away from "harmonizing" entirely new rules into existence... which, again, with not all that much searching you can easily find examples of them stating outright.
And the forces trying to influence those committees, are not all just sitting out in the public with some .org website with their true mission stated clearly above the fold. And I just use these UN committees, which are themselves literally the result of one search and a few seconds scrolling through the search page and anything but a complete list, as plain and obvious public examples operating in public for at least nominally good purposes. Nothing stops anyone from buying politicians in multiple countries at a time to push through something like age verification directly, without being open about who they are.
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=united+nations+committ...
Yes, it screams "conspiracy theories" because it is literally a theory that involves malign conspiracies. And yes, this is repellent to many people.
It is most repellent, I think, to people who genuinely hold the belief ("I want to prevent minors from using websites that are generally agreed to be harmful to minors"). When you tell these people "no, you actually want a totalitarian state that controls what adults are allowed to believe", they think you're crazy, because they don't believe this.
That this is an inevitable consequence of the solution to the problem that they want to solve is a question of tradeoffs that people are not generally aware of, and I think it's way more important for people to be aware of those tradeoffs without being told that it is the illuminati and the freemasons and George Soros and Fox News trying to Orwell their way into a global police state.
I need to figure out some way to communicate how these things really work.
I think lots of people around here would agree that "the rich" are doing nefarious things. But people get real fuzzy on what those things really are and how they work. Like, the rich don't just stand around in a well-apportioned fancy study with a big wooden desk, smoking a cigar and ambiently shouting into the void "GEE I SURE HOPE THINGS GOOD FOR ME HAPPEN" before checking their pocketwatch for the time and pouring themselves an expensive alcoholic beverage... and then, in entirely unrelated news, it so happens that for no reason the government loosens some environmental restrictions that was bothering the billionaire, and some worker's rights get rolled back.
They hire people who know how to build organizations, and give those people money, and those people hire other people who know how to build those sorts of things, and then they hire lawyers and managers and line workers and people who know how to outsource and contract and do whatever it needs to get it done.
And none of these people are going to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times outlining exactly how they're doing all this. Even if they aren't actively trying to be secretive, they don't run around telling people all about it.
You can see a public and frequent example of how this works when a politician spins up a major election campaign, like for President or Governor. An entire organization of thousands of people with one explicitly political goal spun up, grown, expanded with volunteers, and then shut down again in a matter of months. It's much closer to how this stuff looks than the unexamined ideas people seem to have in their heads. It's no problem for a billionaire to spin something like that up for a cross-country law push.
Or, to put it simply, the way the rich accomplish their goals is basically with "conspiracies", specifically in the form of these sorts of organizations built to accomplish their goals. They don't just hope and wish. They use money to pay people to do things. If your view of the world doesn't have room for that, if your brain flips out at the idea that rich people pay people to do things, that's not a sophisticated and refined view of the world that is so much better than the ones held by those people who keep falling for those theories... it's hopelessly naive. Things mostly happen because people take actions. The way you and your buddies may get together to clean up a park on a weekend, a billionaire or a collection of them create organizations to do things.
That doesn't even remotely mean every conspiracy is therefore true. But things like a coordinated push across multiple countries for almost the exact same law is plainly obviously the result of some organization that has been built to accomplish that goal. That is by far the most likely outcome. No other one makes even slightly as much sense. I don't have to know what that organization is for that to be my most dominant hypothesis.
> I think lots of people around here would agree that "the rich" are doing nefarious things
I'm sorry, while this may be true, you in particular have lost me at this line.
It may be true that some rich people, like people from all walks of life, are occasionally doing nefarious things. I think generalizing this to an entire group, "The Rich", sounds as off-kilter as people talking about crystal energy or pyramid aliens or bigfoot to my ears.
To put another way, the supply of rich people who desperately want to change the world to support their desires vastly exceeds the ability of the world to meet that demand. For every rich person who successfully bankrolls and gets a person elected there are 10,000 or 100,000 who fail to do so at early and late stages of this process, and imagining that "The Rich" have access to some facility to change the world is just untenable.
I personally don't think there are many people left yelling "conspiracy" when you say that globalized decisions are being pushed, especially if you've been alive for the last 10 years. Nowadays it's more about who is actually making these decisions and that discussion gets muddy quickly.