The EU has been so far bad at making sure FOSS isn’t seen as a paid product in the eyes of regulation, even in cases where it’s clearly unpaid, see here. They can’t be trusted to get this differentiation right.

Therefore, unlockable bootloader seems like the better idea. Get people to Linux and open Android variants if the closed-source companies won’t serve them.

Here is the source that they want to make e.g. Youtube, Netflix, … rely on this new app: https://www.mlex.com/mlex/articles/2368265/online-services-get-up-to-12-months-to-apply-age-verification-eu-guidelines-say

The main problem isn’t the Google Play integration, but that this requires an Android or iOS device at all. This should be based on something like flutter or electron, and be easily portable with an agnostic build script for e.g. Linux, UBports, postmarketOS, and so on, as well. If only for the reason that most Android and iOS devices will effectively become unpatchable after the mandatory 5-ish years run out, while a standardized UEFI desktop platform will not. There are so many reasons not to have a “standard” smartphone nowadays. Also see here.

Apparently they want everybody to get some sort of “EU wallet”, that is, some digital signed identity which sounds super dystopian. But that’s just what I read. It sounds like a complete disaster.

I feel like a productive way to address this would be to make a child mode mandatory for all operating systems, as some EU countries already did, and then to give parents a better incentive to actually enable it. For example, all end-user devices could be pressured into prominently showing an option to enable it when first booted up (without forcing your hand either way) so that it’s hard to miss. There are so many other ways to improve this situation.

And allowing the public crawler might also have it feed their AI: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/cloudflare-wants-google-to-change-its-ai-search-crawling-google-likely-wont/

See here: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/cloudflare-wants-google-to-change-its-ai-search-crawling-google-likely-wont/ If you have a source that says it’s false, I’d be curious.

Often it is respected, but the resulting problem is platforms conflate things with the questionable AI scraping crawlers to blackmail websites into participating in feeding AI.

For example, Googlebot if enabled won’t just list you for search, but will also scrape your contents for Google’s AI. I imagine LinkedinBot, given it’s microsoft, will feed some other AI of theirs as well on top of the previews.

Until regulation steps in to require AI bots to separately ask for crawling permission, or to actually get a proper license for reuse of the contents, this situation isn’t going to improve.