What is the main reason users refuse to verify their identity online?

The primary reason is a profound privacy and security concern. Users are increasingly aware of data breaches, surveillance, and the permanent nature of digital footprints. Handing over government-issued IDs or biometric data to countless private companies creates a single point of failure and exposes individuals to identity theft, profiling, and loss of anonymity for benign activities.

Will age verification laws like the UK's Online Safety Act kill the open web?

Many experts fear it will severely damage it. Laws mandating age-gating for vast swathes of content force site owners into a difficult choice: implement costly, intrusive verification systems or geo-block entire regions. This Balkanizes the internet, stifles small publishers and independent creators, and shifts power further towards a few large platforms that can afford compliance, undermining the decentralized ethos the web was built on.

Are there any less intrusive alternatives to mandatory ID verification?

Yes, though they are often overlooked in policy debates. Alternatives include: 1) Client-side age estimation (analyzing browsing patterns locally on the device), 2) Attestation-based systems (where a trusted entity like a bank or school vouches for an attribute without revealing the underlying ID), 3) Staged or graduated access (granting more features with more verification, rather than a binary gate), and 4) Focusing on robust parental controls and digital literacy education instead of blanket verification.

What happens if most users simply abandon services that require verification?

We are already seeing the early stages of this 'digital migration.' Users retreat to smaller, decentralized, and privacy-focused platforms (like the fediverse), use VPNs and Tor to bypass geo-blocks, or revert to offline and peer-to-peer media consumption (like buying physical media). This creates a two-tier internet: a highly monitored 'mainstream' web and a shadow web of tools and services designed explicitly to avoid tracking, which could ironically make genuine safety enforcement more difficult.

Technology

The Digital Identity Crisis: Why Users Are Refusing to