Thank you very much for that question, which is a difficult one to answer, but let me try my best to speak to some of the points you raise.
I'm intimately familiar with the age verification laws that have been enacted in the United States and some other jurisdictions. My view is that these laws are ineffective not just because of the technological points that you raised in the question, but also because we have a fundamental problem, which is that this technology is not mature and poses many risks to the privacy and cybersecurity of individuals who are using the Internet. This is a solution that, as technology develops, may be better. This is why I believe that the Senate bill is ill-considered at this time.
As to age-appropriate design as a different concept, the idea of age-appropriate design is that websites or other online services that cater to children, or that are likely to have young people as users, must incorporate, by design, various kinds of protections to ensure that they are used in an appropriate manner or that they are protected from misuse.
I think this is a very important set of interventions that get to the previous discussion that was had with Ms. Thomas, which was regarding the prevalence of this kind of harmful content in many parts of the Internet. The idea here is, again, to reduce the prevalence of that content by making sure that sites that appeal to children or that are likely to be used by children have measures in place to keep them safe.
I think the larger point that I'd like to make here is that this is a very complex set of problems that have no single legislative or technological solution. We're going to need different points of intervention that regulate different kinds of players in the technology ecosystem, as well as people who use technology, if we're going to effectively deal with the problem.
I also think that it's important to understand that we're never going to achieve a 100% solution to any of these problems. The problem of sexual exploitation of children or of the circulation of unlawful intimate imagery certainly predates the Internet. It will probably postdate the Internet in terms of what technology comes next, so what we should be looking for are solutions that are significantly effective in reducing the prevalence of this content and the harm it causes.