"Online safety" laws and age verification mandates have absolutely NOTHING to do with protecting children. You cannot stop under-16s from accessing a website without checking the age of everyone who visits it. And you cannot check everyone's age without forcing them to prove who they are. "Child safety" is the cheese in the mousetrap. Laws sold under the banner of "child protection" constitute a Trojan horse for a system requiring every adult to verify their identity before they can speak, read, or post online. The child is merely an emotional shield. The adult is the real target. And once that infrastructure exists, the pretext can be swapped out at will. Today it is pornography, social media and "harmful content". Tomorrow it is messaging apps and online banking. Soon after it is your ability to access the internet at all—each incremental step gated behind a digital ID you are required to keep in good standing. It's no accident that the exact same "online safety" agenda is being rolled out across the entire Western world simultaneously, with each national government reaching for a slightly different pretext to justify the same outcome—a verified digital identity standing between you and the open internet. Different countries. Different pretexts. Same infrastructure. They are not building a system to keep children safe. They are building the identity layer for a permission-based internet—orchestrated from the supranational level by people you never elected—where access to information itself becomes conditional on obedience. The point is not to make the internet safer. The point is to make anonymous access impossible. Because a person who can read, speak, organise and dissent anonymously is difficult to control. A person whose most intimate online activity is anchored to a state-monitored digital ID is not. Once every account, search, post, payment, message and website visit is tied to a verified identity, the internet stops being a public square and becomes a monitored enclosure. But the gate only closes if people accept "online safety" laws at face value.
