I am not against age verification for child protection. But these shoddy laws put the fifth step before the first. The problem is that the age verification itself is a complicated matter, but the law just dumps the obligation to do a verification onto companies and in the case of the UK law even small organization or single persons if they have a website with communication features, but fails to specify any regulation for these verification systems. As a result I foresee a lot of tea app disasters in the future. Companies will overreach with information gathering, probably by scanning id cards, and as they will be incredibly stupid with it, things will leak. And id cards contain very sensitive informations about the people in question.

What *should* happen is that lawmakers regulate the space of age verification systems, probably through certification or better yet by offering age verification as a service from the state. This includes safety for the gathered data and assurances to only release the needed informations to clients (aka only a >18 yes/no without further informations). *Only* once certified age verification systems are running stable and early problems are ironed out, then is the time to dump the obligation to use them on website owners.

Yeah, this can only go well...

BREAKING NEWS!

After putting the Xbox 360 disc of Dead or Alive 4 in the Series X. The game is still great and gorgeous! 

DOA'S 4 boss is horrible

In what way.  Regulated means you always need to get laws done and have to work against multiple different governments and agencies.  You act as if this is something easy or simple to do and the amount of coordination just to get enough people on your payroll to accomplish anything is a nightmare. Just the scope of regulation alone is huge especially when you have to pay huge amounts of cash to bride and get things done and you have to hope the people you bribe stay in power and or public sentiment doesn't change where new laws come into play against what you want.  The majority of corporate lobby groups always look to find ways to deregulate not regulate because its way better and easier in a unregulated industry.

As I stated, this definitely looks like a Law maker play for more control of the internet and you can believe corporations really would like for the Law makers to stay out of the way because once they come in, doing business is going to be real big pain.

That is not winning because once the government gets involved then you see a slew of regulations start to drop and you cannot control all of it.  People think its easy to regulate governments and laws by corporations but its not.  Corporations never want anything regulated and I have never seen any corporations trying to get any laws passed for regulations.  If a law is passed they would want the least amount of regulation as possible because it never makes sense having to jump through a whole lot of hoops and red tape to get things done.

Also what corporations would want any of this age verification laws.  You would have to sell me on who does it actually benefit and what industry and why because for the life of me I cannot think of one.  All your data is already out there on the web and all the data you use to access anything is there for the picking without any need for some age verification. 

Big and established companies want regulations that make it harder for new and upcoming companies to compete. They sometimes work with lawmakers and often it is then some bureaucratic bullshit big companies can implement but that slows new ones down a lot.

Yeah, that seems not in favor of any company. But it could work out for the bigger ones once they establish some verfification system, because again the new companies will face extreme risk with this law.

Glad to see Monster Hunter Stories FINALLY come to Xbox. I'm not a JPRG player at all, but I love this series! Hopefully the first 2 games make it over before then.

They need to make up their damn minds