The EU, the UK, and a growing list of other governments are tightening age-verification rules for online services, and several have started treating VPNs as the next thing to push against. The framing is protection: children shouldn't be reaching the worst corners of the internet, and platforms should be the ones stopping them. It sounds reasonable until you look at what the policy actually does.

Society has always shared the burden of age-gating. Bartenders check ID, cinemas refuse minors, shopkeepers ask for proof. The question isn't whether strangers should ever enforce age limits — they always have — it's whether this particular way of enforcing them online is worth what it costs.

A bouncer glancing at a driver's licence doesn't create a database. An online age-verification system usually does. Even when the data is "only" handled by a third party and "only" stored briefly, the cost is permanent: every adult who wants to read or watch something is now either entering identity data into some chain of systems, or being pushed toward whatever workaround is currently fashionable. That cost is borne every day, by everyone, to deter a population that will route around it within an afternoon.

Because they will. When I was thirteen, somebody at school always had a porn magazine and was perfectly happy to share it with the entire class. Kids who want to find something will find it; the only thing that changes generation to generation is the route. A 13-year-old today needs about thirty seconds and a free VPN app to be back where they started. The kids the law is aimed at are the ones least constrained by it. The people actually constrained are non-technical adults — the audience the law was never about.

What would actually help is unglamorous: better device-level controls, real digital literacy in schools, and support for the parents who can't or don't engage with their kids' online lives. Set the limits at the source. Expect them to be broken. Scold the kid when they are, and treat the broken limit as part of the education rather than evidence the cage needs to be tougher. Kids whose parents have those conversations turn out fine. Kids whose parents don't won't be fixed by a government-mandated ID check on the other end of the wire.

The reason no minister picks that approach is that it's expensive, slow, and invisible. Funding parenting support and digital-literacy curricula shows results, maybe, in twenty years. Mandating age verification and declaring war on VPNs lets you hold a press conference next week. Every government picks the same way every time, and the people who end up paying for it are the adults who weren't doing anything wrong.

Protecting children is a real goal. This isn't how you do it.