You act like bad outcomes are somehow okay if they result from narket forces, and I'm really not sure why.

If market forces regularly and consistently lead to undesirable outcomes in the long-term, maybe we should re-evaluate why we surrender so much of our policymaking to "market forces"

The biggest change imo is that in the aughts, the idea that children should have unfettered access to personal computers, phones, and the internet was unthinkable. Now we have millennial parents seriously arguing their kids should have smartphones in class. But all this deanonymization garbage is downstream of that vibe shift.

I don't think it's responsible to blame any specific person or company, but I certainly can't excuse the Googles, Apples, Samsungs, Facebooks etc of the world. They manufactured a culture driven by putting as many devices in front of as many people as possible, using them as much as possible, while knowing as much about them as possible to monetize their attention. The careless disregard for how that affected the developing brains of two generations of people now is irresponsible and ugly.

It seems like no one is asking the real question here, which isn't why Roblox/Discord et al need to verify the age of their users. We should be asking how in the fuck there are so many children with unsupervised access to devices that this is a real problem.

As a socialist, I would argue those are both inevitable outcomes of capitalism.

First market forces incentivize consolidation (which imo killed off the vibrant early internet...), then a few players got really powerful.

Once you have that much money and power, and given the inevitable corruptability of politicians, it makes sense to try and use that money to try and manipulate market rules in your favor.

The evolution of the internet has been an in-vitro demonstration of capitalism failure modes and as somebody who liked the internet, that's very unfortunate.