• The Civil Liberties Catastrophe: Anonymity As The First Casualty
• **The Danger You Build by Banning The Danger **
• **Whose child is it, anyway? **
• **Self Custody Not Permission Slips **
• The Man With The Red Flag

The British state, in its infinite and infinitely dangerous wisdom, has decided that the internet requires a license. Not for all, mind you, just for the young, which in practice means for everyone, since age verification that actually functions cannot stop at the border of childhood. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government proposes to ban social media for under-16s, enforced through “rigorous age checks” that will require government ID, facial scans, or biometric estimation for every user of every regulated platform from Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, to Facebook, and X. 

“We’re going further than any country in the world,” he said, framing it as a gift“ more time, more security, more freedom to grow up.“ In a recorded statement the same week he put it more plainly: *“Social media is making our children unhappy and unsafe, and as a parent, as much as a Prime Minister, I just can’t let that go on anymore.” *

It is a good line, but if you have been reading my articles for any considerable amount of time you obviously know that it’s one of the more dishonest pieces of technology policy to come out of Downing Street in years; not because child wellbeing isn’t a real concern, but because the mechanism on offer has almost nothing to do with the stated problem and everything to do with an old ambition the British state has nursed for decades, which is knowing who you are before it lets you speak.*

The Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology will be empowered to determine which platforms, which features, and which circumvention tools, including VPNs, fall under the axe. To the uninitiated they may buy the child protection schtick but in reality it’s the construction of a digital panopticon, while laying the foundation for universal internet licensing. *

§The Civil Liberties Catastrophe: Anonymity As The First Casualty

Here is the part the press conference glossed over a little bit. You cannot ban a sixteen-year-old from a platform without first identifying everyone who isn’t sixteen. There is no selective door that only identifies U-16s but a checkpoint that everyone walks through. The Open Rights Group correctly identified the fundamental tension: “Protecting children online should not mean building surveillance infrastructure for everyone.” Yet that is precisely what is being built. 

Privacy and technology researchers have already warned that the verification requirements baked into this plan risk “surveillance creep and data breaches,” and the Open Rights Group has flagged the same problem with the private age-verification companies now positioned to become the gatekeepers of who gets to have a social media account in Britain. In case you hadn’t picked up on it yet this is actually the slow rollout of digital ID through the back door. The state is getting the functional equivalent of one, platform by platform.

This draconian measure therefore means that every social media account is traceable to a real name, a real address, a real person. By clandestinely outlawing anonymity online, this means that whistleblowers cannot expose corruption, dissidents cannot organize, journalists cannot protect sources, and ordinary citizens cannot speak freely without the permanent threat of state or corporate reprisal. 

Not only that, but the endless collection of your data at every “online checkpoint” means that your personal data is vulnerable to hacks. A Discord data breach in October 2025 exposed tens of thousands of government ID images collected through age verification appeals. The state has proven time without number that it cannot secure what it collects. Every centralized database of biometric data is now a honeypot for criminals, hostile actors, and eventually the state itself. Facial recognition systems carry false positive rates that will lock out legitimate adults while determined teenagers bypass them with VPNs, parental accounts, or simple persistence. The surveillance infrastructure will fail at its stated purpose while succeeding magnificently at its unstated one, which is the gradual elimination of anonymous speech. 

This diabolical plan doesn’t stop at the platforms. Starmer’s plan also requires manufacturers like Apple and Google to build content-filtering software directly into devices sold in the UK, unlockable only by proving you’re an adult, with fines and criminal liability for noncompliance. The state isn’t regulating an app anymore, but is reaching into the hardware as well. As history has shown many times before, once that capability exists; the facial scans, the ID uploads, the device-level gates, it does not stay quietly confined to the original justification. Infrastructure built for one emergency is infrastructure available for the next, and the one after that. 

§**The Danger You Build by Banning The Danger **

The ban exemplifies the fatal conceit of central planning applied to human behavior. The state assumes it can calculate the optimal age for digital access, the optimal platforms to restrict, and the optimal enforcement mechanisms to deploy. It cannot. No bureaucrat possesses the local knowledge of millions of families, the evolving technological landscape, or the heterogeneous needs of individual children. The ban is a crude, one-size-fits-all imposition that will generate precisely the harms it claims to prevent. 

Prohibition does not eliminate demand, but simply relocates supply to black and gray markets. When Australia implemented its under-16 ban, VPN downloads surged dramatically. Research suggests 61% of under-16s there still have access to social media despite the ban, while critics warn the policy is mainly succeeding at leaving children less prepared for the internet once they’re legally allowed back on it. 

The UK can expect the same, and worse. Teenagers barred from Instagram and TikTok will not retreat to wholesome offline activities, but they will migrate to unregulated platforms, encrypted spaces, and darker corners of the internet where no safety mechanisms exist, where grooming is harder to detect, and where content moderation is nonexistent. The state’s “protection” will push children toward precisely the “unregulated environments” where genuine harm is most likely. This should not be understood as shilling for social media companies, as they too have a well documented history of making the platforms more addictive by design; however it’s just the rational critique of an insane and half-baked policy that is being hailed as the best thing since sliced bread. 

The next step is already underway, with a government consultation actively considering “options to age restrict or limit children’s VPN use,” and the House of Lords has already passed an amendment, 207 to 159, calling for an outright VPN ban for under-16s within a year of becoming law. VPNs are essential tools for privacy, security on public networks, workplace access, and circumvention of censorship. To require age verification for VPN usage is to demand that privacy itself be licensed. Ironically, the VPN ban would also strip children of one protection against the very corporate surveillance the government claims to oppose, since without VPNs, social media companies’ third-party trackers can continue monitoring young people’s behavior via IP addresses without interference. 

“Ban VPNs” sounds, to most ears, like banning a niche tool for privacy enthusiasts. It isn’t. A VPN is, at root, an encrypted tunnel, the same fundamental technology as the TLS connection your bank uses to verify your password, the HTTPS padlock on every checkout page that’s ever held a credit card number, and the encrypted link a remote employee uses to reach a company server from home. Legislating against “encrypted tunnels used to evade age checks” without legislating against encrypted tunnels as a category is not technically coherent, because the protocol has no way of knowing or caring what it’s being used for. A law that meaningfully restricts VPN technology either fails against anyone determined to use one, obfuscation already defeats most detection; or it succeeds by weakening the infrastructure that e-commerce, online banking, and remote work all depend on. There is no version of this that inconveniences only teenagers.

§**Whose child is it, anyway? **

Parents have natural authority over their children not because the state grants it, but because parents create, nurture, and sustain their offspring. The child is not a ward of the state; the parent is not an agent of the state. The family is the primary unit of social organization, and the state’s intrusion into child-rearing is an act of aggressive trespass.

The state has no original claim over an app that sits on a teenager’s phone any more than it has a claim over what book sits on her shelf. A parent who wants their fifteen-year-old off TikTok already has the tool, which is to simply delete the app, set the device controls, and say no. None of that requires a national identity infrastructure routed through every platform in the country. Starmer’s ban inverts this natural order. It substitutes the judgment of politicians and bureaucrats for the judgment of parents.

It declares that Liz Kendall, the Secretary of State, knows better than millions of mothers and fathers whether their 15-year-old should access Instagram. It treats parental consent as irrelevant, parental supervision as inadequate, and parental authority as subordinate to ministerial decree. In what world is co-parenting with the state ever a good idea? Clearly the Marxist dream of the state as god and the nationalization of the family is slowly coming true.

Furthermore, the state has no legitimate property claim over the internet nor can the UK government claim jurisdictional authority over online activities. The internet isn’t territory the Crown grants entry to, but it’s a decentralized mesh of voluntary connections, private servers, private devices; and the correct response to a state trying to install checkpoints on it, is to build around them. The state’s claim to “permission” who may speak, read, or associate online is a claim of ownership over other people’s property and other people’s minds. Mesh networks, peer-to-peer tools, decentralized identity systems that an individual controls rather than hands to a verification vendor, all of it routes around the chokepoint instead of asking the chokepoint nicely to be smaller. A petition to repeal the Online Safety Act has already cleared 450,000 signatures, and the VPN surge that followed Britain’s earlier age-verification rules shows the public already understands this instinctively, even when the politicos don’t. 

§**Self Custody Not Permission Slips **

The assault on the internet described above is not merely a censorship regime, but it’s an attack on the very architecture of digital property rights, which is also identical to the central bank monopoly on sound money. Just as the Bank of England claims the exclusive right to issue legal tender, debasing savings through inflation while criminalizing competing currencies, the UK government now claims the exclusive right to issue digital personhood, verifying who may speak, read, and associate online while criminalizing unverified identity. Both are gatekeeping operations; that are enforced through state violence; thus they are both illegitimate. 

Bitcoin made consensus possible without a permission-granting authority sitting at the center of it. No central bank decides whether your transaction is valid; thousands of independent nodes do, each running the same open rules, each free to leave if the rules change against their interest. Miners don’t apply to Westminster for a license to add a block; they compete in an open, falsifiable contest called proof-of-work, where the only credential that matters is the energy and computation you’re willing to spend. 

Now hold that architecture up against what Starmer is proposing. He wants to replace an open, falsifiable contest with something closer to proof-of-personhood by permission slip, a system where your right to participate in a network (public discourse, rather than a ledger) is adjudicated not by an algorithm anyone can audit, but by a private verification vendor reporting to a state authority everyone is required to trust. Where Bitcoin minimizes trust by distributing validation across thousands of disinterested nodes, the age-gate maximizes it, concentrating the power to authenticate a human being into a handful of companies with direct lines to government. One system is trust-minimized by design. The other is trust-maximized by design and trust concentrated that thickly tends to get abused, in the same way that every currency monopoly eventually gets debased by whoever holds the printing press.

Digital property rights, over your keys, your data, your biometric identity, collapse the instant a third party can revoke or condition your access to them. A bitcoin you don’t hold the key to isn’t really yours; an identity you can’t assert without a vendor’s sign-off isn’t really yours either. Both are forms of the same dispossession, dressed up differently. The honest answer to platform harms was never going to be a permission slip.

§The Man With The Red Flag

It’s worth asking what happens after the gate goes up, because age verification rarely stays contained to the platforms it was sold against. Once “prove who you are to use this” becomes an ordinary expectation rather than an outrage, it migrates upward, into the operating system itself. Picture the unremarkable Tuesday a few years from now when a routine Windows update arrives, and buried in the changelog is a new requirement: a linked Microsoft account, verified against a government-recognized ID check, just to keep using the device you already own. Smartphones got there first, and the PC was the last major holdout of device ownership that didn’t ask who you were before it would boot. It won’t stay that way once “proving you’re an adult” has been normalized as the price of using any screen at all. The people who think this sounds far-fetched are the same people who would have called platform-level ID checks far-fetched eighteen months ago.

None of this is new behaviour from the state. In 1865, Parliament looked at the emerging motor car, a machine threatening to make horse-drawn transport, and the industries built around it, obsolete and responded with the Locomotive Act, capping speeds at four miles an hour in the country and two in town, and requiring a man to walk sixty yards ahead of every vehicle waving a red flag to warn the horses. The law stayed in force for thirty-one years, and it was never really about safety; stagecoach and railway interests lobbied hard for restrictions that happened to protect their own business models from a disruptive new technology. The flag-bearer is worth keeping in mind, because it’s the same reflex wearing a different costume: confronted with a decentralizing technology it doesn’t control, the state’s first instinct is never “let’s understand this.” It’s “let’s make someone walk in front of it with a flag.”

In conclusion, the purpose of a system is what it does; not its stated objective. While these measures are being rolled out in the name of protecting kids, the reality is that the state’s solution is only going to result in the construction of an inescapable digital prison, and eventually the imposition of a digital ID. The surveillance is the safeguard.