I would also encourage taking a critical look at the underlying investigation as it seems mostly LLM generated without a huge amount of manual due dilligence

If not, who has been paying to lobby for these age verification laws ?

That seems a question that we should have an answer to.

Forcing an age check upon linux install seems anti-competitive, and a violation of freedom of speech allowed by the Constitution.

Also impractical and ineffective, unless they plan on some sort of bio-metric confirmation of age.

Will they outlaw computation itself, or constrain a personal quota so that only corporations can access approved LLMs and certainly not run a local AGI ?

As with the insane "encryption is a weapon and cant be exported" policy of the 80s, this will surely force innovation to migrate outside the US.

However this is the kind of investigation that Reddit is famous for, which ends up causing more harm than good, like the Boston bombing investigation.

Age verification, for example, is coming no matter what - there’s a big enough chunk of voters tired of tech globally.

Governments are also tired of dealing with tech and want to bring them to heel.

These macro forces are far more significant than the amounts identified on lobbying in this investigation (~$63 mn iirc)

Given the title, the reading of the article implies Meta is driving age verification.

The content of the investigation, reads more as meta taking advantage of the push for age verification to move it to the OS layers.