I've long been a big fan of Porkbun, switching over to them from namecheap who I supported from back in the SOPA era. But today Im very frustrated. A friend of mine was required to go through Age ID. This is in Australia and is despite there being no legal requirement to ask for Age ID on domains in Oz.

Yes Age verification for social media was recently enacted into law; but I think we should expect that good companies don't self opt into additional systems of surviellance until such time as they are legally compelled and at the very least have exhausted other options.

It stings harder as I had porkbun pegged as one of the companies standing up for users and pushing back against a surviellance web. Angry and frustrated.

The title is "Why Does Porkbun Require ID Verification for Some Accounts?", and there's no suggestion that it's due to age, the reason given is abuse and fraud.

"Porkbun requires ID verification" is a better title.

That's not selling out. They explain that it's to combat abuse and that this was not their first choice.

By all means move to a different registrar, but deliberate honestly. They are not requiring ID/face scans for the same reason Discord and Roblox are, as your framing suggests.

The title here seems both editorialized and inaccurate?

They’re asking for IDs as an anti-fraud measure, not an age check.

Who isn't collecting biometric data using shady sites nowadays? Even Hetzner wanted to match my id with a selfie using some really shady site that almost certainly violates gdpr… What's next, will I have to send a stool sample to view posts on Twitter?? Funny how that's not even unlikely nowadays, with slippery slope becoming less of a fallacy and more of a universal law…

Is this a domain registrar? I would think giving them your id would be in your interest...