casually searches for the catgirl distro to completely upend my life for a weekend

I see Linux being more and more widely adopted in Europe, for one. I imagine there will be an ‘EU standardized’ distro forked to prevent any issues of interoperability between government systems. Hopefully, such a widespread adoption for PCs encourages more development for Linux from software devs.

The latter part of your points is what really scares me as well. It’s only a matter of time until “protecting the children” becomes “defining what adult content is” and policing gender, sexuality, and politically inconvenient ideas under the guise of morality.

Call me a cynic, but I absolutely do not believe that companies “know that the days where they can just shrug off child predators using their products is coming to and end”. I don’t believe they give a fuck at all. In fact, if somehow a case made it to court and the court laid the blame at the foot of, say, Facebook, or whatever company, for a child being harmed, they still wouldn’t care because the money they make simply existing as is so wildly outstrips any fine they could possibly be levied that it doesn’t make economic sense to do anything differently.

There is real damage being done now and no one seems to care enough to stop it. Why go through all this negative PR about privacy violations if you can just keep doing the same thing?

Now, I can’t claim to know what the “real reason” these laws are being passed is, but if I had to hazard a guess, it would be because it gives more accurate data on users to sell and it is cheaper to advertise to your users when they directly tell you their age. Now, you can freely show pornographic ads, gambling ads, whatever, to your adults without ever having to worry about buying user data to know who will receive it. If a kid sees porn, well, you shouldn’t have let them on an adult account.