Australians to face age checks from search engines

Support for regulation and age checks

• Some Australian commenters back the rules, seeing them as overdue limits on foreign platforms that “failed to moderate” themselves.
• Main concern is not soft nudity but hardcore porn, addictive social media, grooming of minors, misinformation, and extremist content.
• Supporters argue it’s reasonable to restrict minors’ access to social feeds and NSFW content at the infrastructure/platform level rather than relying solely on parents.
• The underlying legislation also penalizes social networks that harvest government IDs or misuse youth data, which some see as directly targeting “surveillance capitalism”.

Privacy, civil liberties, and censorship fears

• Strong pushback that “age check = identity check”. Any robust scheme implies centralised ID, loss of anonymity, and easier state or corporate surveillance.
• Many describe Australia as already a surveillance state (metadata retention, warrant‑light access to browsing data) and see this as another step toward mandatory digital ID and full logging of online activity.
• Slippery‑slope scenarios are outlined: from safe-search toggles to mandatory logins for all sites, ISP‑level blocking, and routine use of browsing history as evidence.
• Critics argue “protecting children” is a pretext for broad content control and political censorship, with ambiguous categories like “misinformation” and “high‑impact violence” easy to abuse.

Effectiveness and technical feasibility

• Skeptics note kids can log out, use incognito, VPNs, alternate devices, or proxied search; many teens already know how.
• Debate over moderation: one side says platforms actively under‑invest and ignore serious reports until shamed; the other says at scale it’s impossible to eliminate abuse without massive false positives and huge manual costs.
• Previous Australian age‑verification attempts and UK‑style schemes are cited as technically fragile and easily circumvented, while creating concentrated ID honeypots.

Parents vs state vs platforms

• One camp says this is fundamentally a parenting problem: delay smartphones, use dumb phones, home filters, education in critical thinking and online safety.
• Others respond that in practice kids get school‑issued laptops, ubiquitous Wi‑Fi, and intense social pressure to be on mainstream platforms, so parental controls alone are unrealistic.
• Some propose less intrusive alternatives: device‑level child modes, ISP content filters configurable by parents, or standardised “adult content” flags sites can emit for voluntary filtering.

Big Tech’s role and regulatory capture

• The code was co‑drafted by an industry group representing large US platforms, leading to suspicion it will entrench incumbents by tying age assurance to their login ecosystems and data profiles.
• Some argue these same companies helped design the regime and are not being constrained so much as formalised as identity providers.
• Others counter that only large platforms realistically have the resources to implement such schemes, and government action—however imperfect—is the only lever available.

Australian political and cultural context

• Several commenters say Australia has long been highly rule‑bound and authoritarian despite its relaxed image, with strong “ban it” instincts and extensive regulation in many everyday domains.
• The measures are framed as part of a broader Anglosphere trend (UK, EU, US states) toward online nannying, speech restriction, and pervasive monitoring, with Australia seen by some as a “testing ground” for such policies.