Create a better, standardized, open-source parental control tool that is installed by default on all types of device that can connect to the web.
The internet aspect of the parental control should be a "Per Whitelist" system rather than Blacklisting. The parents should be the ones to decide which domains are Whitelisted for their kids, and government bodies could contribute with curated lists to help establish a base.
Yes, there would be some gray area sites like search engine image search, or social media sites like Twitter that can allow you to stumble into pornography, and that is why these devices that have the software turned ON, should send a token through the browser saying "Parental Control". It would be easier for websites to implement a blanket block of certain aspects of their site than expect them to implement whole ID checks systems and security to make sure that no leaks occur (look at the TEA app) like the UK is expecting everyone to do.
Also, I'm for teenagers (not little children) having access to pornography. I was once a teenager, every adult was, and we know that it's a natural thing to masturbate which includes the consumption of pornography for most in some way. Repressing their desires, their sexuality, and making this private aspect of their life difficult isn't the way. Yes, yes, there is nuance to it, (very hardcore/addiction/etc) but it should be up to the parents to decide with given tools if they trust their kid to consume such a thing.
As for the tool itself. Of course we have parental tools, but they can be pretty garbage, their all different, they're out of the way, and I understand that many people simply don't know how to operate them. That's why I believe that creating a standardized open-source project that multiple governments can directly contribute to and advertise for parents is the way, because at the end of the day, it should be up to the parents to decide these things, and for the government to facility that choice.
Obviously, besides the internet aspect, the tool should have all the bells and whistles that you'd expect from one, but that's not the topic.
And yes, some children would find a way, just like they're doing now for the currently implemented ID checks. It's not lost of me that VPNs with free plans suddenly exploded in 4 digits % worth of downloads. A lot of those are tiny people who are smart enough. Or using an app like a game to trick Facial Recognition software.
Also, I'd be remiss to not point out a very obvious fact. This, and I'm not just referring to the UK, isn't about children, it's not about terrorism, it's not about public safety. It's about control, it's about tracking, it's about documenting, it's about power over the masses. I know some people will hand wave this away, but we have been seeing a very obvious, very fast, rise of authoritarianism since COVID and later the war in Ukraine. It's not a new trend, but it is one that got accelerated at those stages and has been progressively getting worse world wide.
I'm against: pornography, as found in search results, is generally quite bad. Sexism, racial stereotyping, misrepresentations of queer issues: and that's just the titles. Page 3 has nothing on porn sites.
Maybe I'm judging a book by its SEO spammers here, but I've not read anything that'd disabuse me of this notion: indeed, people raise concerns about unreasonable body image expectations, normalising extreme sex acts like choking without normalising enthusiastic consent practices, the sites allowing CSAM and "revenge porn" that they've already taken down to be re-uploaded…
That said, I routinely come across nudes / sexualised imagery on the Fediverse, and that's… not an issue? Sometimes I find it a bit squicky (which teaches me not to play lift-the-flap with clearly-marked content warnings – I don't know what I expected), but the only times I've seen something viscerally offensive has been people re-posting from porn aggregation sites. (I've blocked three or four accounts for that, and I don't see it any more.)
If porn sites had the kind of stuff that queer / disabled techies post on main on niche social media sites, then I'd be absolutely fine with teenagers accessing porn. As you say, a safe environment for adolescents to explore their sexuality is unequivocably a good thing. I just don't think commercial porn sites provide that.
This is what concerns me the most about the Online Safety Act. It's shutting down the aforementioned queer / disabled techies on their social media sites, and surely plenty of other pro-social sex communities I don't even know about, but it's not going to do a thing about the large aggregators that are the real problem. It in fact makes the whole problem worse.
I don't think children should have access to porn, because they should have access to decent sex education, and (most?) porn is extremely misrepresentative of reality. According to https://xkcd.com/598/, exposure to porn can affect people's sexual fetishes. I think it is bad for people to develop an interest in violent, dangerous, or asymmetrically-pleasurable sexual activities before they have have had a chance to… uh, however it is people would otherwise figure out what they're into.
It is better for people to learn about BDSM from actual practitioners (including the background context, such as… uh, safe words? and whatever a "scene" is) than from fictional characters. If the average person (or, heck, the average 16-year-old) attempts to act out a rape fantasy, without proper access to information about SSC / RACK / etc, how's that going to go?
This isn't really the sort of thing you can teach in schools. For one, children mature at different rates: some 15-year-olds are too young to even be thinking about that sort of thing, while others are having sex in secret while their parents pretend to be oblivious. (And some of us never start being interested in that sort of thing.) Teaching anything more than the basics (how reproductive biology works, contraceptives, STIs, respecting consent, enforcing consent, the risk profiles of various popular sex acts, "if you skip foreplay, you might need additional lubricant to avoid injury", "don't use condom solvent as a lubricant", "seriously, don't rape people") in compulsory education fails to respect children's autonomy and is wrong. (Schools don't teach those basics properly, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.)
I also do not trust schools to provide decent sex education, because there are even "good schools" that cover up peer-on-peer rape, and place the onus of "getting along" afterwards on the victim. How's an institution that does that supposed to teach a holistic notion of consent? (No environment with such a high child-to-adult ratio where the children aren't allowed to leave is ever going to be safe, but the reputational incentives lead to particularly bad outcomes when these things happen; we don't have strong enough cultural norms requiring that adults act responsibly when what "shouldn't happen" happens.)
For similar reasons, I think any policy based on the assumption that children are innocent little angels we must avoid corrupting, is dead on arrival and bound to fail. Children are young people, with all the autonomy that entails.
There's no particular difference, apart from power dynamics, between exposing a 17-year-old to sexual material they don't want to see, and exposing a 30-year-old to sexual material they don't want to see. Of course, we cannot generally ignore power dynamics, which is why age-based rules are useful; but age is a proxy for things like autonomy, capacity for choice, informedness of choice, and tendency for choice to be respected by others. A 17-year-old at risk of exploitation does not magically become less vulnerable on their 18th birthday. If the rules to protect teenagers from harm don't protect all teenagers, there's probably something fundamentally wrong with them. (Yes, yes, you can move the threshold to 20. Very clever. Way to miss the point.) Furthermore, if the rules don't protect all teenagers, they probably don't even protect all teenagers below the age of 18, because they're not addressing the problem close enough to its source / to the harm.
As should be apparent from my earlier post, I have very little personal experience with pornography. But I have spent a while thinking about this topic, and I'm not sure how this position is parodic. Perhaps you could enlighten me?
Maybe the social ills caused by porn will disappear with proper sex education; in that case, I might be inclined to support the prospect of children who choose to seek it out having the authority to access pornography. But my current understanding of the world suggests that a restriction is more beneficial than access. (It's only, what, four years to wait? During which time children can learn to deal with randiness in ways other than "fire up ye olde web browser" or "shag a friend".)
Computer-mediated ID verification, and the Online Safety Act in general, is obviously bad, and should be opposed. But, being obvious, that goes without saying. (Was that your objection: that I didn't clearly pick a side?)