It really only has roots in money like every other thing these people do. They have insatiable appetite for growth at any means, if that means they use fascism or religion as a tool they will, this however seems to be profit motivated not control motivated when you look at the most likely scenario that benefits all involved. The more people want restrictions on social media to and the like the more social media giants become targets for fines and regulatory action if they dont put in more stict content filters or moderation (which would cause rage baited engagement to drop and lower their profits). These age verification laws shifts responsibility from those companies over to the device manufactures and the cost onto consumers. Manufacturers are ok taking the hit of implementing it at an OS/hardware level because it means new devices need to be sold to become compliant, as hardware climbs in price that means it pushed more people on budgets into cloud pc based options meaning they dont loose money on the money invested in datacenters when the AI bubble bursts. It also means open source alternatives could be regulatorly bared from competing if they need to enact this as most will not wont to from an ethics stand point nor have the funds to create any bespoke hardware to fulfil regulations. In addition since you do have the fascists currently in power they can pretend like the amount of data this will generate from could be actionable to try and gain grants from authoritarian regimes looking for more control on a population, which just means profit margins have increased for all involved as they spend less of their own money. In the end its a way to force move people onto cloud based hardware to support the massive datacenter investments the AI bubble created.