

100%.
They don’t give a crap that only large corps can ‘absorb the cost’ of checking age and/or ID, they just want to control/limit what we say and to whom, and what we can do online. And if that requires to kill small non-corporate-owned web (and make everything subscription-based, in the process), so be it.
When they’re not being dishonest, they’re incompetent and proud of it. The few that are not incompetent (and that are honest) they are not numerous enough to make a difference, which is sad. And not just in the UK. I mean, here in France it’s quite interesting too, we’re following steps to the UK, btw, and, what not a surprise, VPN usage has skyrocketed the second they introduced their own version of that stupid age-verification.
Next step seems obvious: make VPN use illegal for the average user (I mean people like us not, say, journalists, NGOs, lawyers and, obviously, politicians—and their families).
Correct. In a less obvious way we can even see it at play here, in this (interesting) discussion.
So far, in the comments trying to design a culprit, I have yet to read one that doesn’t blame some ‘other’ group, be it the far-tight, the rich, the boomers, the US, Russia, and so on. Forget the names and the personal preference: each one is that ‘foreigner’, someone that is not us on which we put teh blame. The issue is among us, with all our differences and contradictions (even sometimes our hatred of one another). It’s not ‘them’ causing the issue ‘we’ are the victims of.
As long as we keep looking for someone else than us to blame, well I don’t see things getting much better anytime soon. Which is sad because if they don’t start getting better soon they will get real worse, real a fast.
Posting that from France, a country that once valued freedom so much as to make it one of its three core principle. But that was back then.