Anyone reading this purely as a child safety or campaign finance story might miss the broader architectural war happening here. If you zoom out a little, this is the inevitable, scorched-earth retaliation for Apple's ATT rollout from a few years back.

Apple cost Meta billions by cutting off their data pipeline at the OS level, justifying it with a unilateral privacy moral high ground. Now, Meta is returning the favor. By astroturfing the App Store Accountability Act through digital childhood alliance, Meta is forcing Apple to build, maintain and also bear the legal liability for a wildly complex state-by-state identity verification API.

Gotta give it to Zuck. Standing up a fully-fledged advocacy website 24 hours after domain registration and pushing a bill from a godaddy registration to a signed Utah law in just 77 days is terrifyingly efficient lobbying.

>Gotta give it to Zuck.

if "it" is the middle finger, for sure. "terrifying" is a great choice of word for it.

I was equally impressed/terrified by Apple's marketing blitz around client-side-scanning. So many people got paid to advocate for that, and the community barely convinced them it was a bad idea. There's not much hope left for any of FAANG deliberately resisting surveillance.
Well they can profit from that so why resist if ordinary user usually cares only about colors being pretty and Instagram/tiktok/x/your slop generator of choice working properly.