The Internet thinks that lobbying is bribery. If you wanted a bribery like vehicle, you'd just donate to a PAC or more recently, the new ballroom. Lobbying is just paying people to speak to politicians. After a company has said everything that wanted to every politician that can possibly support their cause, there isn't anything left for them to do.

Am I the only person who recognized that this bill explicitly does not require any sort of id verification? The point is to make apps and websites more accountable.

There is no requirement that the OS has to verify the person's ID. It literally just requires a dropdown menu to select your age bracket.

> Now your countries are little different from Russia or China or Dubai etc where the old money cabals run everything,

This is clearly propaganda manufactured by the evil tech cabal to suppress grassroots efforts to protect children from their brainwashing. /s

In all seriousness, populist outrage doesn't help anyone except for the power brokers who can hide their true intentions under all the noise. As much of an overreach I think the Patriot Act was for example, the degree of harm that resulted from it is minuscule compared to the brainrot caused by social media. If you want me to oppose the age verification laws, then you need to convince me that those laws won't actually reduce brainrot or that surveillance harms me more than I think and let me come to my own conclusion.

Even if you ignore the climate impact, fossil fuels pollution causes millions of premature deaths a year, and unlike with global warming, that effect is localized. That alone should be reason to transition off of fossil fuels, especially coal which is the dirtiest.