US bill eyes mandatory OS-level age verification

This bill targets the OS as the ultimate bottleneck for digital identity, potentially turning every smartphone and PC into a mandatory identity checkpoint. Centralizing verification creates a massive privacy honeypot of government-linked identity data, while platform holders may resist the liability of storing sensitive documents for billions of users. Furthermore, the bill lacks clarity on how decentralized open-source projects like Linux would comply, and critics argue it offloads a difficult compliance hurdle from social media giants like Meta onto their platform competitors.