Maybe, maybe not. It'll be signficiantly harder for the EU to target decentralised services with no organisation behind them. It'll be far easier for them to put every major tech site which accepts VPN traffic into the box of organisations they can still fine. I'm not entirely sure the wider population will really care all that much once the dust settles. The internet works in China, and people are happy with it, and while we can agree that is probably what you'd call th dark age, you'll need significantly public opposition to do anything about it. I think we'll sadly see most major tech sites adopt whatever age verification tool the EU builds. They did with all the various form of payment system though this was obviously helped along with the API provided by companies like visa.
Honestly you could probably even use the 0 cost back charge that visa has, which is used by some finance services to verify that you are who you say you are through the visa connection to your national digital identity.
> I think we'll sadly see most major tech sites adopt whatever age verification tool the EU builds.
No, we won't. Tech doesn't care about users. We saw this when Valve delisted thousands of games in Germany instead of implementing the (completely anonymous) age verification process we've had built into our ID cards for years.
They do care about money though, and there is a difference between delisting thousands of games in Germany and losing access to the EU market entirely.
Honestly you could probably even use the 0 cost back charge that visa has, which is used by some finance services to verify that you are who you say you are through the visa connection to your national digital identity.