I wonder how much of that is actually parents texting kids, and how much of that is that kids are using that as an excuse to why they checked their phone mid class.
That seems like one of the easiest excuses for kids to make that is hard to argue against.
The response is probably that gambling is designed to be as addictive as possible, and while your friend might think they will not get addicted, is it really a good risk to take?
I get the feeling they do not in fact take age verification seriously and just want to do the low effort solution needed to satisfy various countries laws.
One key point of insight is that companies are counting single line AI autocomplete as an AI generated line of code, pumping up these metrics quite significantly.
There is not a finite about of wealth, but the wealthy are currently using their position to reduce the amount of wealth the average person has, by driving up prices of everyday requirements so that they can make more money.
It's not an issue that they are wealthy, it's that they are abusing that position to gain even more wealth at the expense of the rest of the population.
I'm fairly certain that would not work at all for media such as sci-fi/fantasy books, where a system like this would result in people just forever reading older books which are free and effectively kill the market.
There is a limited amount of time to read in a day and the amount of 10+ year old content that is still amazing is more then anyone could ever read, and it's hard to compete with free.
I think video games is actually kinda an anomaly when it comes to copyright because they have been, on average, getting better and better then games released even in the recent past, mostly due to hardware getting better and better. Also any multiplayer game has the community issue where older games tend to no longer have a playerbase to play with.
Same could be said about movies/tv shows that rely on CGI up until somewhat recently where the CGI has pretty much plateaued.
That seems like one of the easiest excuses for kids to make that is hard to argue against.