You Are Drafting the Age-Verification Rule: One Child Against a Hundred Million Logins

To Protect One Child, Must the State Check Every Adult?

The dilemma in plain terms Activists want a law that keeps people under 18 away from online pornography through robust age verification and platform accountability.

They link early exposure to a distorted understanding of consent and point to Australia's minimum age of 16 for social media. The easy answer is to agree immediately, because no one argues that children should have free access to such content. But consider what "robust" means in practice. An age check that a determined thirteen-year-old cannot get around has to verify the identity of every user.

That turns the most private part of an adult's online life into a gate where identity is checked and logged.

What each choice costs

If the state does too little:

• Children continue to reach explicit content in a few clicks, at an age when their understanding of intimacy and consent is still forming.
• Parents and schools carry the whole burden against a stream of content designed to be easy to reach.

If the state demands identity-based verification for everyone:

• A database linking real identities to sexual browsing habits is created. That is exactly the kind of record most valuable to blackmailers, hackers and anyone seeking leverage.
• Adults who are entirely within the law are treated as suspects before they can access lawful material.
• Some people will move to unregulated sites that ask for nothing, so the rule pushes users toward the least safe parts of the internet.

The constitutional test The Puttaswamy (2017) judgment made privacy a fundamental right and set a proportionality test: a restriction needs a basis in law, a legitimate aim, it must be the least restrictive means available and it must have safeguards. Protecting children clearly passes the "legitimate aim" test. Universal identity-based checks struggle on the "least restrictive means" test, because there are other ways to establish someone's age.

The decision **Reject identity-linked verification for every user.

Adopt layered, privacy-preserving protection:**

• Child-safe defaults on children's devices, SIM cards and accounts, so protection follows the child rather than inspecting every adult.
• Age assurance without identity disclosure, where a third party confirms only that a user is over 18 and the site never learns who that person is.
• Strict platform duties, with penalties for platforms that fail to deploy these tools and a ban on keeping any verification data.

What this sacrifices: some children will still get through using an adult's phone, a VPN or a careless household. A stricter system would stop a few more of them. A responsible official should say this openly rather than pretend the problem has been solved.