Matt Burgess and Lily Hay Newman, reporting for Wired last week:

Beginning today, millions of adults trying to access pornography in the United Kingdom will be required to prove that they are over the age of 18. Under sweeping new online child safety laws coming into force, self-reporting checkboxes that allow anyone to claim adulthood on porn websites will be replaced by age-estimating face scans, ID document uploads, credit card checks, and more. Some of the biggest porn websites—including Pornhub and YouPorn—have said that they will comply with the new rules. And social media sites like BlueSky, Reddit, Discord, Grindr, and X are introducing UK age checks to block children from seeing harmful content.

Ultimately, though, it’s not just Brits who will see such changes. Around the world, a new wave of child protection laws are forcing a profound shift that could normalize rigorous age checks broadly across the web. Some of the measures are designed to specifically block minors from accessing adult material, while others are meant to stop children from using social media platforms or accessing harmful content. In the UK, age checks are now required by websites and apps that host porn, self-harm, suicide, and eating disorder content.

Protecting children online is a consequential and urgent issue, but privacy and human rights advocates have long warned that, while they may be well-intentioned, age checks introduce a range of speech and surveillance issues that could ultimately snowball online.

Pornography-gating laws like the Online Safety Act have existed in various Republican-led U.S. states for the past few years, with Texas, Florida, and Utah being the most notable. What separates the Online Safety Act — which Wired refers to as “new online child safety laws” for some reason — from these Republican speech restrictions is that they apply to all content on sites that may distribute pornographic content. Bluesky, for example, isn’t an adult website, but all users must verify their age to view all content. This content is filtered arbitrarily and may include sexual health information, LGBTQ resources, or other safety nets that make the internet a thriving, diverse community of people from all walks of life, religions, countries, and, importantly, ages.

I have a problem with these laws, not because I condone minors being exposed to sexually explicit material on the internet, but because they shift the blame of poor (or, shall I say, careless) parenting from the parents to every resident of the United Kingdom. The internet, since its very beginning, has been designed to be open to every person with a connection. The internet doesn’t discriminate on race, religion, gender, or age — it provides everyone with equal access to information by default. Draconian speech regulations in unfree nations like China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and now, apparently, the United Kingdom, change the calculus of a free internet because they put restrictions on who can view what content. An internet that once didn’t discriminate against anyone suddenly is forced to discriminate against certain people because of their nationality. Internet speech laws are the antithesis of the internet.

In the United States, platforms cannot be told to remove most content. The only exception is if it actively incites violence or poses some danger to the public, and even then, the law is usually on the side of the social media platforms. This law, the First Amendment, is one of the greatest pieces of legislation ever written in the world because it plainly states that no government, no matter how democratic, can pick and choose what U.S. citizens see, read, and say. (It’s a different story that fascist Republicans in the Supreme Court threw out the First Amendment years ago and now it’s nothing more than a worthless sheet of paper.) Pornography access ought to be protected by this law, no matter how scary Republicans think it is, because speech laws are the antithesis of the internet. We’ve built a masterful network of communications infrastructure that allows anyone anywhere to make money doing almost anything they want, and governments want to throw this amazing project in the trash because some parents can’t control their children’s internet usage. It’s an unbelievable travesty.

The internet and its relative lack of speech regulation are sacrosanct. Sympathizing with the U.S. military in Iran is considered terrorist activity, and every free country is willing to condone that classification. Why isn’t the free world ready to condone blocking downright discrimination of certain individuals based on their age on the internet? We can argue that adult content is bad for children, but Iran’s government can also argue that liking America is bad for children. My point is that it’s impossible to draw a line about where governments can begin discriminating against certain groups of people and their speech (or access to speech) on the internet. Millions of websites offer pirated R-rated movies free of charge online — are they obligated to check the identification of their users because R-rated movies shouldn’t be shown to those under 18?

None of this even considers the privacy implications of this draconian, anti-free-speech law. A few days ago, parasites on 4chan leaked the driver’s licenses of every user of the Tea app, a service that allows women to share stories about men they’ve dated. The database of leaked licenses assembled a map of every single user of the app, including their home address, date of birth, full name, and photo. What if Aylo, the company that owns a host of pornography sites, had its British database of driver’s licenses hacked? That would put every single person who viewed adult content online on a map for anyone to see. People could get fired over legal content they happened to view online. Don’t tell me this is impossible — Tea told its users their licenses would be deleted as soon as their gender was verified. That was a lie, and an easy one to spot, too, because you should never give your identification to anyone online.

The only solution to preventing minors’ access to adult content is by educating both children and their parents about the dangers of internet pornography — not passing a broad, overarching speech law that is the complete opposite of everything the internet stands for. Keep the internet free forever.