It appears that the free global internet, such as it was, which many of us loved and grew up with, is nearly dead. Long gone are the days of anonymous IRC chats or where only paranoiacs thought their emails were monitored. The growing standard is the government demanding websites know who you are all the time to “protect” you from a myriad of trivial things such as “hate speech” or videos of people eating too much.
As has become common, it is not any of the “authoritarian” states we hear about leading the way to the end of internet freedom, but instead the ethnic European parts of the former British Empire. The United Kingdom itself has just implemented legislation which demands all users upload ID to show they are over eighteen when using anything it deems “dangerous,” while Australia is restricting all of those sixteen and under from having social media accounts whatsoever, again to protect them primarily from thoughts the government dislikes. The British legislation is particularly dangerous as it is expected that sites based anywhere in the world comply with expansive moderation rules, while Australia’s law is a blanket ban on social media usage for an age category. In both cases, however, they kill internet anonymity and set a terrible precedent.
The internet has been under siege from many directions for many years. It is true that America’s regime change class found free internet useful for “Color Revolutions” and did at times use it to undermine foreign governments. As a consequence, it has historically acted as a defender of internet freedom when it advances other objectives. Thus, something like “The Great Firewall of China” which we were conditioned to care about, though it did not impact anyone outside of China.
The attacks on the internet have only grown more blatant, such as in Brazil where Judge Alexandre de Moraes has been on a rampage trying to “protect” the public from political speech he dislikes. In the United States, however, the bigger problem was originally just collecting enormous amounts of data secretly, which they did while encouraging people to use the internet however they wished—creating all the more data. The attempts at algorithmic mind control pushed by the Joe Biden administration and complacent—or enthusiastic—tech companies was again done while purporting to be for a free internet. Despite government hypocrisy and abuses, the internet remains the greatest communication tool in human history and we should protect it at all costs, while remaining mindful of government data collection activities, information control, and regime change operations.
The British and Australian laws are all the more nefarious as they impact almost all internet activity, and of course, they use the classic line “Won’t someone think of the children!” Age verification for pornography is one thing—that brings the internet in line with the laws of the physical world where you can’t walk into a store and buy that content without an adult ID; but this is much broader. As a recent Politico article explains, as well as pornography, there are age verification limits on, “hate speech, content promoting drugs and weapons, online harassment and depictions of violence…Large platforms restricted everything from X posts on Gaza to subreddits on cigars, and blocked content entirely in certain cases.” As Kym Robinson recently explained, they are rapidly medicalizing internet use and making it about physical and mental health, which for eKarens is an endless justification for meddling. In short, nearly anything fun or interesting could be considered adult content and the sites themselves are being made to police this or face significant fines, which intentionally creates a situation where cautious site owners will expand it past anything the government demands. No reasonable man can have any faith in any supposed privacy protections which are said to stop governments from accessing the ID used to age verify an account.
It’s easy as an adult to forget the experience of being a child, and imagine children lack the ability to understand anything about the world around them, when in fact they are learning such things at a rapid pace. It happens to be the case that I was twelve n the year 2000 when the first major law on this topic went into effect in the United States: the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act [COPPA.] This law, in its original form, stopped kids under thirteen from having accounts on any website without a parent’s permission. To recover your email address your parent had to put in credit card information, which many were hesitant to do back then in an era where online shopping was still fairly rare. The thing about that though was the sites simply removed the option to sign up if you were under thirteen and had no verification option, so no one’s privacy was made worse; it was just annoying and condescending towards children.
What is notable about this is that at the time I wrote a persuasive speech for English class against this law. I have a reason to remember at age twelve that my classmates and I were able to understand the policy being unfairly implemented and I was able to write a formal argument against it. Now, being a parent instead of a twelve-year old, I certainly have some different views about what is appropriate for children, but the ability of children to understand what is going on around them is greater than commonly realized. The Australian Communications Minister tried to defend their ban on all social media use, including YouTube, for kids under sixteen by likening it to teaching your kid to swim in the pool before putting them in the ocean with the sharks and rip currents. In fact it is the exact opposite: it throws kids right in at sixteen with no experience when they are the most irresponsible and difficult to control.
What is the most nefarious about these “age verification” laws is that the United Kingdom and Australia both regularly arrest internet users for posts that they don’t like. The end of anonymity will kill the most valuable discourse coming from either country. Both of these countries in many ways seem completely defeated and devoid of the love of liberty, but in fact have thriving and creative “anon” communities still carrying the fire of freedom. The ability to express opinions and tell the world what is happening will all but disappear under a regime where you have to verify your age to use Spotify—not to mention how ridiculous it is to ban seventeen-year olds from using Spotify even if it impacted no one eighteen and above. Everything that has happened up to now shows that age verification laws in these countries will set the stage for an even larger crackdown on all unapproved thoughts.
Something I have noticed in my time on this Earth is that you can tell a lot by a man for how he uses the term “the Wild West.” It is generally either used by liberty lovers to mean, “You’re allowed to do what you want and it’s awesome,” or by sniveling Mandarins to mean “This is terribly dangerous and needs to be regulated.” I have long feared a future where the young say that they internet used to be like the Wild West and view this as scary and dangerous. Now, the younger generation seems to be coming up tired of the schoolmarm government, but it will be a hard fight to keep any of the internet’s Wild West charm as it is consumed by meddlesome nanny states.
If these laws in the United Kingdom and Australia are allowed to stand it will represent a major step in a perhaps irreversible process whereby the internet will become ever more broken up by the country of the user, and in most of them much less free. I would be able to take some comfort in the idea that this could send people back to the pubs to talk in person, but the Brits are also cracking down on pub banter, and I somehow doubt other states are far behind them.
