Canada

The goal is to erode privacy, and the pearl clutching about children is always the excuse. There are a lot of groups who want to eliminate privacy online: cops, copyright holders, and religious nuts to name a few. They're the ones driving this stuff.

If age verification is really the intent then it ought to be possible to develop a service these websites can call into that gives some kind of zero-knowledge age check. The age check service doesn't need to know the identity of the service that's asking, and the requesting service doesn't need to know the identity of the person whose age they're checking. You'd authenticate on a site that only knows someone's doing an age check, and the verifying site would just get a token indicating that the age check was successful.

Am I missing some reason why this wouldn't be possible? It seems to be a problem ripe for zero-knowledge solutions.

If it is possible, there's really no need for an age check requirement to involve disclosing your identity to the site you're visiting, or to disclose your viewing habits to anyone. And if governments or lobbyists are pushing for everyone to upload their full identity to web sites, it suggests either they're ignorant or their motives aren't what they claim.

Equivalent of CRA now or as an implementation that you’re familiar with “sign in with google”

The worry security wise is less about it getting leaked as it is opening a new string of fake websites (because the government data getting leaked/attacked is already an issue)

Harms the youth isn't even the best anti-pornography argument. Sexual exploitation and sex trafficking are concerns. But that's more of an issue with unethical porn (always watch ethically sourced porn folks!)

On the other hand, since the age of internet porn, sexual irresponsibility, teen sex, rape, and divorce have all declined. (Correlation)

There seems to be a lot of issues with the methodology used in those studies.

For example, "...reported hours of pornography consumption per week....". Hours seems excessive. What's the average duration for all visitors?

And, "Women were excluded from the research, because men more easily encounter such problems due to their frequent contact with pornographic materials.". That's an assumption. Women can also have "frequent contact " with porn, so they should have included women.

And one of them seemed to suggest that men who watched more porn had ED. But maybe men with ED first, have had to use porn to help? Chicken and egg situation.

I'm not defending porn, and I tend to make data driven choices.

But I'm acutely aware that methodology can have averse effects on the conclusion, and I tend to be highly skeptical of studies that appear to manipulate the outcome with their selection bias.

Check the financing on those.

Same with Alcohol for those points you listed.