In anycase we all know ways of bypassing this age verification will be found, probably by the kids themselves. But all this will do is enable US big tech, killing the very EU based companies the EU has been crying about for years.
Meta, Twitter, Google and M/S could not have created a better law to protect them then this law.
Hell the crazy things I used to do to connect to the internet after my mother went to sleep. She didn't wanted me using the internet because of phone charges so I secretly got into the roof to strip the phone wire bare and connect my own hidden cable that I would unroll and route it to my room to connect to my modem at night. YES part of it was to watch porn and download mp3s and roms. No I wasn't of legal age. Did my life got ruined by this? Well I'm an IT engineer now so arrive at your own conclusion.
I think this current hysteric moral panic is definitely being pushed by a lobby of a nascent AI industry that wants to create a problem for their surveillance tech solution.
Seeing you were on dialup, how board where you on dec 31, 1999?
Me, I was up watching the systems work great, missing all the cool parties guzzling caffeine for 3 days. But it made managers happy for me to be there. If I tried that now, I would end up in the grave.
By the way I got hit by a considerable electric shock from that. By that time I had no idea phones carried enough tension to actually shock me.