>The Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) is an EU-wide coordination of national legislation on audiovisual media – both traditional TV broadcasts and on-demand services. Recently, AVMSD was revised to extend certain rules to video sharing platforms (VSPs).
>In line with AVMSD, you may be asked to re-verify your date of birth when watching age-restricted videos. Follow the prompts to submit an image of a valid ID or credit card.
I can't confirm without knowing what country you live in. I understand essentially the whole EU requires this, and the US is one example where the checks aren't required.
This is covered by the Audiovisual Media Services Directive 2018/1808. EU member states were supposed to transpose this into national legislation by 19 September 2020, but not all have.
You can see the status for each EU member state here:
Please say which country you're referring to when you say "in my country" on the internet. It allows others to contextualize and verify otherwise useless information.
I doubt it has anything to do with verifying age though. More likely they know people are hesitant to sign up and pay for youtube, but if they can get your credit card in other ways, then later it easier to get you to pay for something because then you just have to press "ok" since your details are already entered.
Plus this gives them your identity, which is relevant because their business model nowadays is based around tracking people.
Referenda are routinely misrepresented in propaganda during debates, and often become proxies for unrelated issues and malcontents (brexit, anyone?). In practice, when you discuss actual issues, pro-Union sentiment is more widespread than reported, and most people agree that "it makes sense" to travel in the direction of closer integration. Even the issues where we kinda "agreed to disagree", like on electric plugs, there is constant moaning as soon as one moves across borders.
For some reason we never see any polls, just opinion pieces, but I'd wager that
(1) people think cooperation is a good idea
(2) and they also want to keep their own countries and identities
Once we start moving towards a single country, the inevitable question becomes, which rules and values should people follow? Which country gets to assert its way of life on the others? Or perhaps the virtual state known as the "EU" should assert its own values (whatever they may be)?
Now imagine expanding the EU to Turkey. Can we change their legislation to be more liberal? Or should the EU countries follow the hard line authoritarian islam that Erdogan pushes? No one is willing to change. And no one has to as long as the EU stays as a form of cooperation between nations.
If the EU pushes towards a single country, power struggles over values will follow.
Turkey isn't allowed to join in part because democracy is a shared value of the EU. In fact there are mechanisms to suspend the membership of a country that regressed into authoritarianism, they just don't work.
The Lisbon Treaty was, in practice, a repackaging of the earlier "EU Constitution". In general, people seem fine with the EU behaving more like a single country, as long as it doesn't _represent_ itself that way. Most people, say, don't have a problem with the Working Time Directive (which is quite a country-ish thing to do; there are actual countries with less unified employment rules than the EU) but would be a lot less comfortable with cosmetic stuff (like calling the Lisbon Treaty a constitution, even though it clearly is one).
The EU constitution was approved in half the referendums that were held. Also, opposing a concrete constitution does not mean opposing European unification in general.
I still don't understand. And I mean this genuinely. Except for Guy Verhofstadt, I haven't heard any politician talk about creating a single country out of the EU for years. I'm pretty sure most EU politicians have shelved that plan definitively.
>I wish more people understood that the goal of Stack Overflow is not "answer my question" but "let's collaboratively build an artifact that will benefit future coders". Perhaps SO could be doing more to educate people about this. -Jeff Atwood
But the way to built that knowledge base is by answering peoples questions because the questions people ask indicate what is relevant to answer.
Actually I'd be very, very surprised if this was even in the jurisdiction of the EU.