Here is the source that they want to make e.g. Youtube, Netflix, ... rely on this new app: https://www.mlex.com/mlex/articles/2368265/online-services-get-up-to-12-months-to-apply-age-verification-eu-guidelines-say

This is definitely going to be copy&pasted as a foundation in many EU states. Therefore, that it requires Android and iOS at all, let alone Google Play, is a fundamental error. Some people avoid smartphones for good reasons, yet still access parts of the internet that may apparently soon be gatekept by this new age verification mechanism. Also see here.

The main problem isn't the Google Play integration, but that this requires an Android or iOS device at all. This should be based on something like flutter or electron, and be easily portable with an agnostic build script for e.g. Linux, UBports, postmarketOS, and so on, as well. If only for the reason that most Android and iOS devices will effectively become unpatchable after the mandatory 5-ish years run out, while a standardized UEFI desktop platform will not. There are so many reasons not to have a "standard" smartphone nowadays. Also see here.

I didn't find the exact same article, but this one makes pretty much the same claim: https://facia.ai/news/video-platforms-must-enforce-age-checks-or-face-massive-eu-fines/

Some of the quotes in this article are not-the-onion levels of mindblowing:

He persisted anyway, before finding that Replit could not guarantee to run a unit test without deleting a database

How 🤣

This is the most epic comment I've read on lemmy so far 😩👌

you made us proud!

you deserve a trophy 🏆 🥰

not that the government cares, they want to centralize most of the data of citizens now with pretty poor protections in a lot of cases. sads

surprise germans 🫨

And allowing the public crawler might also have it feed their AI: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/cloudflare-wants-google-to-change-its-ai-search-crawling-google-likely-wont/

Often it is respected, but the resulting problem is platforms conflate things with the questionable AI scraping crawlers to blackmail websites into participating in feeding AI.

For example, Googlebot if enabled won't just list you for search, but will also scrape your contents for Google's AI. Edit: see https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/cloudflare-wants-google-to-change-its-ai-search-crawling-google-likely-wont/ as source. I imagine LinkedinBot, given it's microsoft, will feed some other AI of theirs as well on top of the previews.

Until regulation steps in to require AI bots to separately ask for crawling permission, or to actually get a proper license for reuse of the contents, this situation isn't going to improve.