My preference would be just requiring site operators to add the RTA header [1] for anything that could potentially be adult in nature or user contributed content and let parents decide if devices should have parental controls. Not perfect, nothing is but would protect most small children. Teens will easily bypass any method as many today watch porn together in rated-g/pg video games that allow setting up a streaming player in-game.
That would be also nice, but given we can't make everyone to do the most basic interoperability I don't see it working…
As for:
> Teens will easily bypass any method as many today watch porn
well, they do, but each obstacle discourage them to do that. It's like with chocolate while being on a diet - if you have it within reach next to you you are more likely to eat it; put it on a shelf which would require standing and walking - slighly less likely; put it in another room - even less; and if you don't have it in home and you would have dress up and take out the car and drive to the shop most likely you would just wave your hand at that :)
So no - it won't prevent it completely but I'd argue that it would significantly decrease the use :)
That would be also nice, but given we can't make everyone to do the most basic interoperability I don't see it working…
Many moons ago there were a couple browsers that looked for the ICRA PICS label but the adoption was low due to complexity of the header creation and a lack of laws requiring it. I expect it would take an intern an afternoon to create the code to look for the RTA header and probably a couple weeks to get through the QA/staging process. It only needs to initially get into Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox to protect small children on a tablet with kids using a normie account and parents retaining the super-user account. Should a law pass that has a timeline for the check to be mandatory I expect a majority of web agents to recognize and act on the RTA header long before the deadline.
It would be 100% more than what we have today is nothing in the browser and privacy invading third parties that would not be involved in kids going to sites that do not force people into said third party sites which is most of them. To be a fly on the wall when someone tries to force the third party ID checks on 4chan...