Comment by tzs

> And I access the website from my computer how?

By cross device authentication, such as by scanning a QR code displayed on the computer from your phone. Nearly all these laws or proposed laws only require verification on account creation and maybe an occasional re-verification. They don't require it on every login.

> Why would you invite a technology that by definition makes websites accessible only via phones?

In most or all of the countries proposing age verification phone use is extremely high. In Finland it is nearly 100% for people over 15 and not retired. It is around 96% for retired people.

Social media use is heavily skewed toward people under retirement age, which is were mobile use is highest. Even Facebook which many dismiss as the old folk's social media has about 92% of their users under 65. 98.5% of their users use it from mobile devices (82% use it exclusively from mobile).

This all suggests it will only be a very small fraction of people that use social media from desktops and do not have a mobile phone they could use for the initial verification or re-verification.

I haven't seen any country proposing to make mobile the only way to do age verification. They all are including methods that work without a phone, although a phone can give much better privacy and security assurances. (I don't know if any country has considered this but another good option would be to allow accounts that have existed longer than some threshold to skip verification. That would probably cover most of those elderly users without a smartphone).