You've flipped the order here to advocating that we should start with the most burdensome restrictions. That's not how the 1st Amendment and compelling government interests work.

> is one of the most basic things that can and should be done.

The entire criticism of this proposal is that it's not basic and is in fact wildly complicated and has massive privacy and security implications. You can't really paper over that, you're advocating that we start with the most dangerous policies and get around to less dangerous policies later, maybe, if we feel like it.

> I think you're underestimating the burden and difficulty of rolling out such technology, and overestimating the effectiveness and legislators' ability to mandate it.

Perhaps Texas should study some of that stuff and look for solutions before jumping to more extreme policies. What are the actual problems in front of this technology? Pornhub already labels its content using standardized headers (https://www.rtalabel.org) and iOS and Android already have tools that react to those headers and can be used to block content. So is the problem here that parents don't know about these controls? Is this a problem of parental education? Or is the problem that the tools are buggy? Is the problem that the parental controls aren't comprehensive enough? If so, what areas and apps don't they cover?

Has any research been done on that by Texas legislature? No.

The fact that they've largely skipped over those controls entirely suggests that this is less about building safety mechanisms and more about controlling access, which is consistent with the fact that these laws are heavily sponsored by "pro-family" and religious groups who aren't only concerned with children accessing porn, but in fact have very public moral objections to porn in general. I'm not overestimating Texas's ability to legislate, I'm pointing out that they haven't haven't even tried to legislate, and that matters when they're trying to defend against 1st Amendment challenges.

There should be an order to the legislation we attempt because it is exactly as you say:

> There are many things that can be done to protect children, all with varying levels of effectiveness and burdens.

This is correct, every solution has varying levels of effectiveness and burdens. And that is how we prioritize legislation. Where constitutionality is concerned, it is the responsibility of the legislature to exhaust less burdensome solutions before they attempt to implement more burdensome solutions that abridge rights to adult privacy and access to adult content.

Texas hasn't gone through that process, but proponents of these bills still want to draw the (entirely incorrect) comparison between digital restrictions and physical ID checks. They're not equivalent, there are additional (largely unexplored) tools available in digital spaces to keep kids safe that are not present in physical spaces. There are also more risks to privacy and security that are present in digital spaces when collecting IDs, but proponents of these bills ignore those risks entirely (possibly because, again, these bills are regularly sponsored by (small-c) conservative family activists for whom being as burdensome as possible to the porn-industry across the board is a desired effect of the legislation.

It's improper to compare digital ID laws to physical ID laws; the affordances and risks of digital and physical spaces are entirely different, and many of those affordances in digital spaces remain largely unexplored by legislature. But proponents want to skip over that entire conversation and imply that protecting kids requires us to start forcing websites to start collecting drivers licenses or credit card details.