The goal of the legislation was to "stop children from accessing age inappropriate content" on the internet.
Ahead of the legislation it was known that there would be a significant proportion of individuals who would switch to using VPN's because without platform based verification it would be a pita for users (more logins, random age verification services, and some sites just deciding to block).
However, VPN's, come with their own minimum age 18 T&C's, as do the means of payment for those services (credit and debit).
So from the pov of "stop children from accessing age inappropriate content" similar result
Not perfect, but empirically this seems to be working well enough e.g. "New data shows no rise in children’s VPN use after the introduction of online age checks" (https://www.internetmatters.org/hub/research/data-shows-no-r...), i.e. the VPN traffic is largely adults.
As to other unintended consequences, such as making it more difficult for the authorities to snoop on their citizens, I doubt this effectively makes any difference whatsoever.
How much of that is conflated with plenty of sites still operating without age gates? I think its more likely to push people to shadier and shadier sites and not VPNs
It wasn't an unintended consequence.
The goal of the legislation was to "stop children from accessing age inappropriate content" on the internet.
Ahead of the legislation it was known that there would be a significant proportion of individuals who would switch to using VPN's because without platform based verification it would be a pita for users (more logins, random age verification services, and some sites just deciding to block).
However, VPN's, come with their own minimum age 18 T&C's, as do the means of payment for those services (credit and debit).
So from the pov of "stop children from accessing age inappropriate content" similar result
Not perfect, but empirically this seems to be working well enough e.g. "New data shows no rise in children’s VPN use after the introduction of online age checks" (https://www.internetmatters.org/hub/research/data-shows-no-r...), i.e. the VPN traffic is largely adults.
As to other unintended consequences, such as making it more difficult for the authorities to snoop on their citizens, I doubt this effectively makes any difference whatsoever.