Australia is already trying something like this, under the guise of protecting kids. Under 16 year olds are banned from social media starting in December, which is effectively the same as forcing identity verification. Don't know if Lemmy will be affected or not. But I'll ditch this account over giving my ID to "random dude running an instance".

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 3 points 16 hours ago

UK occasionally talks about this kind of thing too. Recently had something come in that caused some web forums to shut down as it was unenforceable for a small forum but the big companies will either comply, pretend to comply or pay/ignore the fines.