By the time you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance that somewhere, quietly and with a great deal of bureaucratic back-patting, someone is trying to figure out exactly how old you are. And not because they’re planning a surprise party.
Not because you asked them to. But because the nine horsemen of the regulatory apocalypse have decided that the future of a “safe” internet depends on everyone flashing their ID like they’re trying to get into an especially dull nightclub.
This is the nightmare of “age assurance,” a term so bloodlessly corporate you can practically hear it sighing into its own PowerPoint.
This is a sprawling, gelatinous lump of biometric estimation, document scans, and AI-ified guesswork, stitched together into one big global initiative under the cheery-sounding Global Online Safety Regulators Network, or GOSRN. Catchy.
Formed in 2022, presumably after someone at Ofcom had an especially boring lunch break, GOSRN now boasts nine national regulators, including the UK, France, Australia, and that well-known digital superpower, Fiji, who have come together to harmonize policies on how to tell whether someone is too young to look at TikTok for adults.
The group is currently chaired by Ireland’s Coimisiún na Meán.
This month, this merry band of regulators released a “Position Statement on Age Assurance and Online Safety Regulation.”
We obtained a copy of the document for you here.
Inside this gem of a document is a plan to push shared age-verification principles across borders, including support for biometric analysis, official ID checks, and the general dismantling of anonymity for the greater good of child protection.
Hellbound and Down 