Cool: agreed. Your objection was ambiguous.

If we had to choose, though, I'd consider the professor's suggestion preferable to age verification. While I disagree with mandating it, it'd pretty much do nothing, because it's already reality: most mainstream OSs include parental controls. The "criteria" would establish standards for parental controls, which isn't altogether a bad idea. A better idea would be to promote a standard & replace mandates with public services to provide parental control technologies free & to educate parents.

In the late 90s, when US Congress attempted to regulate access of adult content to minors, those laws commissioned studies that drew similar conclusions even then. The studies & federal courts concluded that to meet the government's compelling interest in "protecting minors from harmful content", there were more narrowly tailored alternatives to criminalization & age verification that are less restrictive to fundamental rights & are at least as effective:

• client-side filters to block content from the receiving end
• government programs to train parents & provide them resources to "protect" their children from "harmful content"
• public education campaigns.

They pointed out while client-side filters may have false positives & negatives

• they can be monitored & corrected
• they're a more complete solution that can restrict all internet protocols (not just web) from any geographic source (not only in legal jurisdiction) with content of any type (including dynamic such as live chat)
• they allow restriction of other kinds of content (eg, violence, hate speech)
• they can vary restrictions per child (eg, age-appropriateness)
• they let parents disable them
• they don't obstruct access by adults.

Criminalizing access to adult content at the source obstructs everyone's access & burdens them with loss of privacy & with security risk.

Despite their age, those studies' findings remain relevant.

• COPA Commission

  In October 1998 Congress enacted the Child Online Protection Act and established the Commission on Online Child Protection to study methods to help reduce access by minors to certain sexually explicit material, defined in the statute as harmful to minors. Congress directed the Commission to evaluate the accessibility, cost, and effectiveness of protective technologies and methods, as well as their possible effects on privacy, First Amendment values and law enforcement. This report responds to the Congressional request.

• National Research Council

  In November 1998, the U.S. Congress mandated a study by the National Research Council (NRC) to address pornography on the Internet (Box P.1).

Education, supervision, & parental controls/filters seem a more compelling solution. However, bring that up in regard to legislation to age-restrict social media & the tune at lemmy dramatically changes: seems inconsistent.

A lot of parents sadly lack any kinds of skills to use those tools nor even know that they exist. I'm not inherently against the approach where user agent sends some rough age (allowed R-rating or something) to the website which can then block minors from accessing porn/violence/whatever. If it was just that, locally stored info if the user is minor or adult, it could be a pretty decent approach to even technically less inclined parents to give some limits on what their kids can do.

But as with nearly every 'protect the kids' thing, it's a pretty damn slippery and steep slope. If adult verification requires something more than a local variable that's the point when the whole system becomes a tool for surveillance instead of a helpful thing for parents/schools and all of these "solutions" worldwide seems to be going in that direction.