This appeared a day or so ago:
Australia’s online regulation overreach is coming to a screen near you
The Albanese government is cracking down on tech companies giving children unbridled access to explicit content online.
Updated 3:19 PM August 22, 2025
Age verification is coming to Australia’s internet users but our new net nanny systems will affect everyone, not just teenagers.
In June, the federal government introduced rules forcing big telcos like Google to check the ages of logged-in users, in an effort to limit children’s access to harmful content such as pornography. These rules become law by year’s end. Google searches undertaken by minors will have to exclude references to sexually explicit and violent material.
People who stream their television may have already experienced age verification interactions. In July, I was attempting to stream a show on Disney Plus only to be served up with a series of prompts requiring an email address, my age and my gender. Other streamers are doing the same or soon will.
Australians are being given a foretaste of the future. In the UK, the Online Safety Act obliged sites which show sexually explicit or violent material to ensure minors are excluded and introduced advanced age verification checks last month.
A data analytics firm in the UK which studied online access to pornography reported a 47 per cent decline in traffic to the UK’s most popular pornography site, PornHub, a similar slump in viewers at another pornography site, XVideos with the subscription service OnlyFans down 10 per cent in the first weeks of August compared to a period in the previous month prior to the implementation of age checks.
This is the sort of outcome that policy makers would hail as proof of the stunning success of their interventions but it is a long way from reducing social harms. In fact, all the Online Safety Act may have done in the UK is push traffic to less regulated sites. The same data revealed that traffic had increased in sites that refuse to play ball with the legislators. It almost goes without saying that these sites are likely to contain prohibited content, including sexually violent material, incest and bestiality.
A day after the new rules came into force in the UK, two ethical hackers appeared on Britain’s Sky News and bypassed the age verification checks within a few minutes. Multiple viewers contacted the network to confirm the ease in which they were able to get around the age verification checks with one boasting he had done so “in under 30 seconds.”
The UK’s media regulator, OfCom, has recommended content providers choose one of seven age verification checks. The first is called facial age recognition where a face is shown by photo or video and technology determines the age. This raises a serious question: what’s the difference between a 17-year-old face and an 18-year-old face?
While social media restrictions are similarly sidestepped by tech savvy kids, there is almost universal support for them.
Other methods are, perhaps less fallible but far more intrusive. These include banking or telco account checks, sharing of digital ID and email based age estimation where an email address is offered to the provider who uses technology to ascertain the age of the person by examining the duration of other accounts, like electricity and gas bills.
All of these methods are being trialled in Australia.
The other salient point is that data from age verification checks will be stored somehow or other. In the UK, regulators have been quick to point out that users’ activities on porn sites will not be stored. They say the data which may include digital ID, and images taken from passports or driver’s licenses will be encrypted but the best means of preventing hacking into databases is to have no database at all.
Australians will not relish these intrusions and the murmurs now of privacy concerns are likely to become a roar by December when age verification becomes law.
In an attempt to diminish the impact of social harms from kids watching pornography, the Australian government has determined that everyone has to engage in the exercise. Anyone who uses a Google search engine – and that is 90 per cent of Australia’s internet users, or Microsoft Bing searches, pretty much the remaining 10 per cent – will be obliged to verify their age by whatever means the telcos determine.
Google and Microsoft have been told that from December 27 they will have to use some form of age-assurance technology on users when they sign in, or face fines of just under $50 million for every breach.
It may well be that these telco giants already hold sufficient data on their users to determine their age and make the shift seamlessly for most users but given the sheer size of the fines, they will be keen to make sure.
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It’s important to remember that these new rules are distinct from the social media restrictions for those under the age of 16. While those laws are similarly sidestepped by tech savvy kids, there is almost universal support for them. I am one of the standouts, not just because I think the restrictions are ineffective but as they stand, the rules are an abrogation of parental responsibilities. Parents have decided not to have valuable interactions with their children, handpassing the exercise on to the government.
I know, too, the great harms that come from the internet. I have written previously of child exploitation networks, like 764, operating on platforms as banal as Roblox, targeting children and shifting to anonymous platforms like Discourse where nihilistic violent extremists, often children themselves, have been found to extort and exploit other children including urging them to commit acts of self harm.
What can I say? The online world is a dark place for many. However, what we know about prohibition – the banning of or over-regulation by government – is that it will necessarily lead to a dark underbelly where appalling practices continue largely out of reach of regulators and law enforcement.
In the not-so-distant past, governments would have turned to public interest campaigns, advertising and messaging to prevent social harms. Now, it’s an all-in exercise, a legislative sledgehammer to smash a rotten egg.
Here is the link:
I have to say I wonder just how any campaign to restrict internet access for adolescents given just how tech literate they mostly are and how easily they will by-pass any restrictions that will still permit normal adult access to adult material!
Overseas experience would suggest effective adolescent blocks would catch many innocent adults – who struggle with using the tech!
As always the answer is parental guidance and supervision of the young – but most adults seem to struggle with actually doing that.
My guess is that control of adolescent access to the internet is pretty much always going to wind up in the too hard basket! The article above is excellent and shows just hard all this can becone!
What do you think?
David.
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