Parliament had intended to shield children from pornography, self-harm forums and algorithmic bullying. Instead, it required every major platform likely to be accessed by under-18s to implement “highly effective” age verification for harmful content, on pain of fines up to 10% of global turnover.
Ofcom, newly armed with the powers of a financial regulator, wasted no time. Within hours, Reddit demanded facial scans or government ID for NSFW sections — those areas of the site marked ‘not safe for work’, containing adult material such as pornography or graphic imagery — Spotify locked explicit lyrics and music videos behind biometric checks, and Pornhub gated all UK access with ID checks. Within days, thousands of Spotify users faced account deletion. Safety? No. A national firewall was born.
The first crack appeared at dawn. Proton VPN, a Swiss service long recommended by the National Cyber Security Centre for its no-logs policy, recorded a 1,400% surge in British sign-ups minutes after midnight on July 25th. Google searches for ‘VPN UK’ followed the same curve.
Three weeks later, the Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, was on BBC Newsnight declaring virtual private networks “an absolute loophole that needs closing“. Ofcom, reading the mood, issued guidance warning platforms that any encouragement of circumvention tools would be treated as a breach of duty. The message was clear, evasion was now a regulatory offence. The law that gated Pornhub just paved the way for your digital ID....<<<Read More>>>...