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Stop Killing The Internet: No Digital ID & No Age Verification | European Citizens' Initiative
(citizens-initiative.europa.eu)
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2026
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Citizens must not be forced to identify themselves to access lawful online content or services unless strictly necessary, proportionate and provided by law.
Are you not aware of the Digital Services Act? This piece of legislation alone, provides all the incentives for service providers to do exactly that; unless they change their business-model, which is rather unlikely. By default, users should be treated as adults and therefore unrestricted in their access; rather than children unless proven otherwise.
If the EU would simply mandate operating systems sold within the jurisdiction, to allow specification of an optional 'date of birth' field, which is local and purely on a trust-basis (no external verification required); this should be more than sufficient for signaling an age-bracket to a service, which may then serve an "age-appropriate experience".
A digital identity wallet should be strictly reserved for matters that already required personal identification. Using such heavy-handed measures for controlling access to adult content, or even social media, is complete and utter overkill. I'm not interested in more empty, technical, server-side "trust me, bro" promises, for something that is fundamentally disproportional.
nothing should be signaled to any service. the service should signal its age limit, and the local software needs to compare the limit with the user age. that too could happen on a per content basis, I guess HTML or CSS could be extended with a new property for that.
then, if the user age is below the limit, the browser should continue loading the page as usual, but hidden from the user, to avoid introducing a new vector for fingerprinting.
or even to government services portals that did not require personal identification.