No evidence for this, more of a shower thought.

New internet censorship laws make it so that people are less likely to use the biggest online services as well as porn sites, which is potentially a good thing for local business.

In the past, people would go to bars to socialize, spend money, date and so on. Nowadays it's too damn expensive, prices have gone up to the point the better option is to just hang out at home with friends. In South Korea this pressure to abide by societal norms and expectations has combined with the cost of living crisis to lower birth rates below half of what is needed to sustain their society, and even if they use immigration and AI to pick up the slack it will still result in the death of their societal norms and expectations, family traditions and so on will just fade away. Obviously part of the problem is the wealthier people got their power and wealth over many generations and would prefer to keep everything this way forever, but this isn't sustainable and it will ruin the country within the next fifty years if nothing is done. And every developed nation is dealing with a form of the same problem, where the wealthy want to maintain the power structure despite how it forces everyone else to make life changing decisions.

Spending money online means not spending money on local things beyond shipping, it doesn't act as an investment in your community outside of taxes you pay, and entertainment of any kind can be a distraction from aspects of life that need to be dealt with. What's the point of doom scrolling if it only affects your opinions, and not your decisions?

So, maybe the governments of the world are trying to get control of all these problems by targeting what they think is the root of the problem. They feel that social media and anonymity will lead to a boom of bot accounts twisting public opinion against various governments, and by forcing people to use ID to access these sites, bots will be pushed out. It will also prevent people with extremist views and opinions from talking publicly about matters, especially in societies with dictatorships and fascism running the show. Of course, the reality is that civilians will always break whatever rules are forced on them, and will often cause the opposite of what was intended to happen more, but governments are like that, clumsy but powerful and prone to making dumb choices to start with and hoping they can patch things later down the line. They can handle problems that crop up over centuries, but not problems that crop up in decades.

Anyways, maybe shoving people off of the internet will result in a higher birth rate, but I don't think people will be switching back to overpriced bars any time soon, and it's more likely that people will sue to get the money back that they spent on digital products they can no longer use without sharing their ID with third party companies they are right to not trust with private information.

There's probably many other reasons for pushing these laws through across the globe, but this is just about the only universal problem I can think of that it would have a meaningful impact on.

I expect over the next few years, sites will require identification that can be forged, then new laws will be created that require identification that can't be forged, then new kinds of identification will be created that won't harm you if it was leaked but is official and does require payment (which means many people will not be able to afford to use the internet even if they used a public libraries computers to do so), and we'll all look back on the wild-west years of the internet fondly, even if everyone else born after that time knows how these freedoms could have been and were abused to manipulate people.

One thing that's for sure is that any time a government tells people to behave a certain way, they push back. Giving people a false choice results in less pushback, and that's what we're seeing now. People are still pissed off by it, but they're finding ways to adapt or work around it than trying to tear it down.