Okay, so age verification is pretty painless. It's still not a good thing. At all.

It doesn't work. It's intrusive. It creates new vulnerabilities. It's bad for free speech. But…at least it's not difficult for users?

Two years ago, British politicians passed the Online Safety Act, a wide-ranging law which – among many other measures – introduced widespread age verification for anyone wishing to access “adult” content online.

This sort of measure is always very popular, because it’s easy to make opposing it look bad: why do you want children to be able to access porn online? Many supporters of this kind of bill are all too eager to jump to that kind of argument, and do so shamelessly – it’s presented as obvious and agreeable. Decent people want to protect children online. This measure protects children online. So…who would oppose it?

Despite that, the minority of us who do oppose these kinds of measures tend to be quite vocal, sometimes to the point of exaggeration. At one point, the UK’s age verification was going to be for specialist adult sites only – meaning that verifying your age was essentially an admission you wanted to watch porn.

That could have created blackmail potential, even within a se…