Well, we could also introduce official registration for entering video rental stores and sex shops, which would be similar to the demanded stricter controls for internet sex offers.
Not that I particularly want to defend the porn industry - after all, it is one of the main causes of the spam problem (after all, this is an area where the click-through rate is significantly higher than in all other advertising sectors - men really do think more with their pants than with their brains), but the demands to tighten age controls are really absurd: who is going to go to their post office or T-Punkt and present their ID there for registration for an X-Check-ID? Sure, the postal workers don't know what that is anyway. Obviously.
The real problem behind this is something else entirely: the inability of authorities and similar institutions to understand that the internet is simply not a regional event. Stricter age control laws will be just as impossible to enforce across borders on the internet as the already planned opening hours for erotic content on the internet.
Youth protection is something that cannot be enforced through this type of prohibition - only through education and enlightenment. Because with the increasing interconnectedness of the world, there will always be content that is illegal in one country but available from other countries. Even absurd attempts like those of the Düsseldorf government president will change nothing about that.
Either we finally accept this content and its distribution as a social problem and address it at that level (through education and enlightenment already in schools), or we criminalize the entire internet and tinker around with pointless and ineffective filtering attempts, waste money on these absurd projects, hand the state far too powerful censorship tools and rights, and make ourselves look ridiculous internationally.
The latter is the path that politicians are currently taking in Banana Republic Germany - it's also much easier, besides you get the necessary censorship rights for free anyway. Then you can also use them right away for politically unpopular opinions.
At heise online news there's the original article.