I've been thinking a lot about why I feel disheartened at the state of the internet and of possible ways to approach fixing it.
I believe the root cause is the lack of a privacy-preserving 'Proof of Humanity.' My approach to fix this combines biometric passports (ICAO 9303) with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs/Confidential Computing) for verification. We then push a signed payload back to your device, not centralising any data.
I know 'Passport' + 'Internet' sounds like a privacy nightmare and this type of solution is generally disapproved upon by HN. However I'd like to offer an approach that tries to set such a service up as an integral part of the open web: Non-profit (Switzerland for what it's worth) association to avoid monetisation pressures to exploit user data and open source in a Tursted Execution Environment (TEE) to offer some additional guarantees about the processing of user data.
To be clear, this is not pushing for mandatory age verification - that is not the aim. It is however trying to increase the "human signal" on the web as we interact with each other while maintaining as much privacy as possible.