Technology

None of the things you mentioned would incur an age check here because car rental companies demand your driver's license anyway, nobody cares about movie ages, and for alcohol you have to be ID'd in person upon delivery.

You would also think democratic governments have no incentive to legislate something like chat control, but there's always factions that want to control people, including here in the EU.

The ruling classes are scared of what the peasants might get up to when inequality gets too bad or policies too unpopular. Just because it's less bad here than some other places doesn't mean people aren't feeling the effects of it. The people at Brussels must be glad that Estonians don't have guns and can't afford two tanks of diesel anyway, because otherwise I reckon there would be a lot of people shooting up the place over energy prices and whatever. Age checks aren't of much help here, but it adds extra reliability to any browser fingerprint to real identity lookups. Though if you use government services or banks at all, that's already more or less a done deal.