TLDW:
Brazil is requiring OS level age verification by march 17th, 2026.
New York about to vote on a law that would “require all manufacturers of internet-enabled devices, operating systems, or application stores to conduct commercially reason-able and technically feasible age assurance for users at the point of device activation.”
In order to “incentivize” age verification, The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced that they will ignore COPPA violations for software performing age verification.
Whether it is or is not doesn’t really matter, none of the major operating system are developed in Brazil so there are really no consequences for ignoring the law, what are they going to do, ban all computers? Good luck with that.
Redhat has a huge consumer, the Brazilian government, a lot of developers are in brazil, etc. Cachyos (the distro I use) seems to not want to do anything, but when the law enters into action, it’s easier to just block all brazilian ips, like my computer updating. As the government can sue and do other things.