Is all security a weasel word for surveillance? You answer a valid argument with a meme. It is very unproductive.
How do you suggest to disallow children access to pornography, harmful content, etc? Or are you arguing that any solution is worse than the harm that bad actors in search of money and political gain are doing to children?
If the security asks you to "trust them"? Yeah, that's usually pretext for hidden abuse.
When the Wizard of Oz says "pay no attention to the man behind that curtain" then you don't look the other way. Trust is unnecessary in situations where transparency is demanded. Accepting "trust" is equivalent to accepting every single abuse of the technology, up to and including using age verification to facilitate child abuse. Do you really "trust" the internet to use this power for good alone?
> How do you suggest to disallow children access to pornography, harmful content, etc?
Stop leaving them unattended in front of the TV. It worked in the 1980s, it still works with the iPad (gasp! screen time?).
This whole argument reeks of the Catholic moms protesting HBO, desperate to make themselves the victim. Bad parenting is not the TV network's problem. You cannot contort it into a working argument or legitimate ethical quandary. The solitary reason we see age verification pushed so hard is to promote online surveillance. If you want to enrich and entertain your kids without exposing them to topics you consider unsavory, buy them a book instead of an iPad. It's not rocket science.
I agree that the "think of the kids/terrorists/puppy killers" rhetoric is effective, but I don't think that's a reason to dilute my stance. I haven't seen a single age verification proposal that both works and isn't abusable. I cannot imagine a technical solution to this issue any more than I can write a Python program that detects terrorists. It is simply a bad idea that endangers children more than it could possibly protect them.