To be honest, I worry that the framing of this legislation and ZKP generally presents a false dichotomy, where second-option bias[1] prevails because of the draconian first option.
There's always another option: don't implement age verification laws at all.
App and website developers shouldn't be burdened with extra costly liability to make sure someone's kids don't read a curse word, parents can use the plethora of parental controls on the market if they're that worried.
[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_minority#Second-...
Why not? Physical businesses have liability if they provide age restricted items to children. As far as I know, strip clubs are liable for who enters. Selling alcohol to a child carries personal criminal liability for store clerks. Assuming society decides to restrict something from children, why should online businesses be exempt?
On who should be responsible, parents or businesses, historically the answer has been both. Parents have decision making authority. Businesses must not undermine that by providing service to minors.
Physical businesses nominally aren't selling their items to people across state or country borders.
Of course, we threw that out when we decided people could buy things online. How'd that tax loophole turn out?
App and website operators should add one static header. [1] That's it, nothing more. Site operators could do this in their sleep.
User-agents must look for said header [1] and activate parental controls if they were enabled on the device by a parent. That's it, nothing more. No signalling to a website, no leaking data, no tracking, no identifying. A junior developer could do this in their sleep.
None of this will happen of course as bribery (lobbying) is involved.
The real answer to the problem is for websites/appstores to publish tags that are legally binding assertions of age appropriateness, and then browsers/systems can be configured to use those tags to only show appropriate content to their intended user.
This also gives parents the ability to additionally decide other types of websites are not suitable for their children, rather than trusting websites themselves to make that decision within the context of their regulatory capture. For example imagine a Facebook4Kidz website that vets posts as being age appropriate, but does nothing to alleviate the dopamine drip mechanics.
There has been a market failure here, so it wouldn't be unreasonable for legislation to dictate that large websites must implement these tags (over a certain number of users), and that popular mobile operating systems / browsers implement the parental controls functionality. But there would be no need to cover all websites and operating systems - untagged websites fail as unavailable in the kid-appropriate browsers, and parents would only give devices with parental controls enabled to their kids.
Where do you go to vote for this option?
Surely you can find a rationalwiki article for your fallacy too.
In fact, I suspect adults, and not just children, would also appreciate it if the pervasive surveillance was simply banned, instead of trying to age gate it. Why should bad actors be allowed to prey on adults?