> But banning OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini would fix a lot of this.

I doubt that anyone authoring these laws even thinks about the two concepts on the same day. I think these issues are totally separate.

People, generally, have no grasp of what they really want or what downstream effects of what they think they want look like. They don't know what it would take to effect that ban. In fact, I would speculate that if the same group were asked "should you, personally, have to scan your ID to visit Facebook," you'd see a meaningful shift in responses. (yes, I know that's not the way this particular CA proposal would be implemented, the point is that people are fickle and polls are not a good guide for lawmaking)

I also don't base my principles on the desires of the masses. It's our duty as people who understand the technology to prevent the controversy-de-jour from wagging our dog.

I share your feeling that if everyone did it this way and the world promised to stop making bad, privacy-invading ID laws I could grin and bear it. I don't see that happening, thus I am hostile to it in any flavor.

> it's basically the government said "no asbestos in food" and some contrarians

it's actually the government saying "you must include salt in your food" and a few people who cook dinner at home and don't care for salt set up a website teaching you how to desalinate your... (well, there's no direct continuation of the metaphor here, but the point is it's very important that this is not the government banning a developer from implementing something, it is them mandating a developer implement something. That's far more troubling than an "asbestos ban" as in "your open source project must not fry the computers it runs on," which is equally questionable in light of "no warranty expressed or implied" but a totally different ballgame from "this API is required")

> It's not even meaningfully de-anonymizing!

Until I poll the API every day until the bucket changes and now I know your exact birthdate. This law is not well-baked.

> Anti-cheat just has to keep the barrier high enough so regular players don't think the game is infested with cheaters.

And even that's the (relatively) straightforward part. The hard part is doing this without injuring the kernel enough that the only sensible solution for the security conscious is a separate PC for gaming.