The Vice President for Technological Sovereignty of the European Commission published a few hours ago that «Today, the Commission has preliminarily ruled that the pornographic platforms Pornhub, Stripchat, XNXX and XVideos infringe the Digital Services Act by allowing minors to access adult content». She then stressed «online platforms are responsible for protecting minors and must do more to comply with this responsibility».

From Sweden, a developer and podcaster immediately responded: «How can that be achieved without handing over to these platforms our identity and the ability to track us? The last thing I want is for them to be trusted with anything». Another user capped off the thread with: «Please, no more excuses to justify that "handing over all your personal information and identity documents to random Internet services is good"».

And this is the underlying problem: if you want to regulate access, you either trust public institutions or you trust companies that are generally not very trustworthy.

In the end, a «secure point» of trust is needed for all parties that checks identity or certain aspects of it, such as age, and gives the green light to third parties to allow access to regulated information (like porn, etc.) without tracking users to guarantee their privacy. The question is whether states or the EU itself are willing to offer this service universally. That is, if the European Union is capable of going further in the definition of sovereign digital identity.