The concerning part is how vaguely “age assurance” is defined. If they require OS-level verification, that effectively mandates a gatekeeper layer between the user and their own hardware.

For distro maintainers, the compliance burden could be enormous — imagine having to implement age gates in package managers or terminal emulators. And what counts as an “app store”? Is flathub? Is apt?

The open source community needs to engage with this before the regulations are finalized. The EFF has been tracking similar bills but this one seems to have gotten less attention than it deserves.