Tag: internet

Nine Bureaucracies Walk Into Your Browser and Ask for ID

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.

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Rand Paul Turns Against Section 230, Citing YouTube Video Accusing Him of Taking Money From Maduro

Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) has long been one of the few refreshing voices out of Washington, D.C., when it comes to free speech, including free speech on social media and elsewhere in the digital realm. He was one of just two senators to vote against FOSTA, the law that started the trend of trying to carve out Section 230 exceptions for every bad thing.

As readers of this newsletter know, Section 230 has been fundamental to the development and flourishing of free speech online.

Now, Paul has changed his mind about it. “I will pursue legislation toward” ending Section 230’s protections for tech companies, the Kentucky Republican wrote in the New York Post this week.

A Section 230 Refresher

For those who need a refresher (if not, skip to the next section): Section 230 of the Communications Act protects tech companies and their users from frivolous lawsuits and spurious charges. It says: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” If someone else is speaking (or posting), they—not you or Instagram or Reddit or YouTube or any other entity—are legally liable for that speech.

Politicians, state attorneys general, and people looking to make money off tech companies that they blame for their troubles hate Section 230. It stops the latter—including all sorts of ambulance-chasing lawyers—from getting big payouts from tech companies over speech for which these companies merely served as an unwitting conduit. It stops attorneys general from making good on big, splashy lawsuits framed around fighting the latest moral panic. And it prevents politicians from being more in control of what we all can say online.

If a politician doesn’t like something that someone has posted about them on the internet, doesn’t like their Google search results, or resents the fact that people can speak freely—and sometimes falsely—about political issues, it would be a lot easier to censor whatever it is that’s irking them in a world without Section 230. They could simply go to a tech platform hosting that speech and threaten a lawsuit if it was not removed.

Tech platforms might very well win many such lawsuits on First Amendment grounds, if they had the resources to fight them and chose that route. But it would be a lot easier, in many cases, for them to simply give in and do politicians’ bidding, rather than fight a protracted lawsuit. Section 230 gives them the impetus to resist and ensures that any suits that go forward will likely be over quickly, in their favor.

But here’s the key: Section 230 does not stop authorities from punishing companies for violations of federal law, and it does not stop anyone from going after the speakers of any illegal content. If someone posts a true threat on Facebook, they can still be hauled in for questioning about it. If someone uses Google ads to commit fraud, they’re not magically exempted from punishment for that fraud. And if someone posts a defamatory rant about you on X, you can still sue them for that rant.

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Congress Revives Kids Off Social Media Act, a “Child Safety” Bill Poised to Expand Online Digital ID Checks

Congress is once again positioning itself as the protector of children online, reviving the Kids Off Social Media Act (KOSMA) in a new round of hearings on technology and youth.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Introduced by Senators Ted Cruz and Brian Schatz, the bill surfaced again during a Senate Commerce Committee session examining the effects of screen time and social media on mental health.

Cruz warned that a “phone-based childhood” has left many kids “lost in the virtual world,” pointing to studies linking heavy screen use to anxiety, depression, and social isolation.

KOSMA’s key provisions would ban social media accounts for anyone under 13 and restrict recommendation algorithms for teens aged 13 to 17.

Pushers of the plan say it would “empower parents” and “hold Big Tech accountable,” but in reality, it shifts control away from families and toward corporate compliance systems.

The bill’s structure leaves companies legally responsible for determining users’ ages, even though it does not directly require age verification.

The legal wording is crucial. KOSMA compels platforms to delete accounts if they have “actual knowledge” or what can be “fairly implied” as knowledge that a user is under 13.

That open-ended standard puts enormous pressure on companies to avoid errors.

The most predictable outcome is a move toward mandatory age verification systems, where users must confirm their age or identity to access social platforms. In effect, KOSMA would link access to everyday online life to a form of digital ID.

That system would not only affect children. It would reach everyone. To prove compliance, companies could require users to submit documents such as driver’s licenses, facial scans, or other biometric data.

The infrastructure needed to verify ages at scale looks almost identical to the infrastructure needed for national digital identity systems. Once built, those systems rarely stay limited to a single use. A measure framed as protecting kids could easily become the foundation for a broader identity-based internet.

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Germany’s Censorship Frontier And The Rise Of Digital Control

Some achieve notoriety and fame by chance. Fortune may fall into one person’s lap, another may experience his ten minutes of public shine through a fluke rhetorical spark. In the case of the Minister‑President of Schleswig‑Holstein in Germany, however, this is a dubious honor.

In his appearance on Markus Lanz’s show on Germany’s state TV “ZDF”, CDU politician Daniel Günther slid into that revealing tone of small talk to which people are prone precisely when they believe themselves in a supposedly safe social environment – a place where no criticism is expected, no matter what leaves their lips.

What emerged during his guest spot on Lanz was a condemnable attitude toward the principle of free speech and toward critical media: the threat of censorship up to and including the blocking of individual platforms, including the portal Nius, reveals a profound ethical collapse. A growing, subtly operating apparatus of repression is now reaching us – a warning we should take seriously.

It was almost comical how Lanz, styled by public‑broadcasting elites as a star moderator, in tandem with the state‑aligned media sector repeatedly sought in the aftermath to rhetorically downplay Günther’s clearly articulated desire for censorship. Decontextualize, diffuse, and smother the real scandal with new waves of outrage like the Greenland debate – that’s how the media repair operation works.

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WEB WAR: After Shutting All Internet in the Country, Iranian Forces Are Now Jamming Starlink Service, While Users on the Ground Try to Bypass This New Censorship

It’s a technological ‘cat and mouse’ dispute.

As massive protests took to the streets of Iran for days on end, the Ayatollahs’ regime shut down the country’s internet completely.

That left the insurgents relying almost solely on the Starlink services made free by Elon Musk during the confrontations.

So the Iranian government started a two-pronged approach: begin cracking down and seizing all the Starlink terminals it could find, and at the same time, deploy military-grade level jammers to (so far, successfully) disrupt Starlink satellite service.

Both SpaceX engineers and Iranian protesters on the ground are now seeking ways to circumvent this censorship.

France24 reported:

“Iranian authorities cut the public’s access to the internet and telephone communications on January 8. The networks were later partially reinstated, but with severe restrictions. The Iranian regime has been facing a series of protests since late December. In an attempt to crush the movement, the Iranian government also tried to break the last international communication link available to Iranians: Starlink.

Starlink, which provides internet access through a constellation of satellites, was thought to be out of the Iranian authorities’ reach for censorship. However, in recent days, Starlink has been subject to a jamming campaign that has seriously impaired its use.”

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Florida Governor Candidate Proposes 50 Percent Tax on OnlyFans Creator Revenue

Politicians proposing extra taxes on pornography purchases or proceeds is nothing new. But Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback’s porn tax proposal stands out for the extraordinary paternalism that comes along with it.

“As Florida Governor, I will not allow a generation of smart and capable young women to sell their bodies online,” Fishback posted to X on Monday. 

It’s standard these days for anti-porn warriors to wring their hands about how porn viewership is corrupting young men and driving up loneliness, or to proclaim to be protecting children, or to claim that all porn performers are victims of human trafficking. So it’s almost refreshing to someone crusading against porn on “no hussies allowed” grounds.

At least Fishback, intentionally or not, suggests that online porn creators can be “smart and capable” women who are acting out of their own agency.

He just wants to take that agency away.

Specifically, Fishback is calling for a 50 percent tax on whatever people make via OnlyFans—a platform that has become notorious for connecting sexually explicit content creators with those willing to pay directly for said content, but in fact, creators of all sorts can sell content directly to fans through the platform.

“As Florida governor in year one, I will push for the first of its kind Only Fans Sin Tax,” Fishback said in a recent video. “If you are a so-called OnlyFans creator in Florida, you are going to pay 50 percent to the state on whatever you so-called earn on that online degeneracy platform.” 

Fishback said the funds collected from his OnlyFans sin tax would be used to fund education, crisis pregnancy centers, and a “mental health czar for men in particular.”  

He went on to complain that “toxic masculinity” gets blamed for too many of society’s ills when, presumably, everything is the whores’ faults. How adorably retro!

“As Florida governor,” he continued, “I don’t want young women—who could otherwise be mothers raising families, rearing children—I don’t want them to be selling their bodies to sick men online.”

Well, now I’m confused—are men to blame here or not?

On one level, I don’t think we need to take any of this too seriously. Taxing profits from one’s legal speech on one platform and not similarly situated platforms is clearly unconstitutional. Florida doesn’t even have an income tax, which would at least complicate plans to tax OnlyFans income. And Fishback is a long-shot candidate with some serious baggage.

“A Florida school district ‘cut ties‘ with Fishback, who ran an organization called Incubate Debate, after he ‘initiated a romantic relationship’ with a 17-year-old student and faced allegations that he harassed her after they broke up, a charge that Fishback has denied,” The Spectator reports.

“The odds that Fishback will win the primary are not quite zero, as he’s running against Congressman Byron Donalds, who’s dogged by insider-trading and proxy-voting scandals,” points out the Spectator columnist who goes simply by Cockburn. “Yet Fishback seems to be doing everything he can to lose, generate outrage, or both, calling Donalds, who is black, ‘By’rone’ on X – as in ‘By’rone wants to turn Florida into a Section 8 ghetto.'”

So, schlock candidate makes schlock proposal, we all gawk, and that’s that, right?

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UK to bring into force law to tackle Grok AI deepfakes this week

The UK will bring into force a law which will make it illegal to create non-consensual intimate images, following widespread concerns over Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot.

Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said the government would also seek to make it illegal for companies to supply the tools designed to create such images.

Speaking to the Commons, Kendall said AI-generated pictures of women and children in states of undress, created without a person’s consent, were not “harmless images” but “weapons of abuse”.

The BBC has approached X for comment. It previously said: “Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”

It comes hours after Ofcom announced it was launching an investigation into X over “deeply concerning reports” about Grok altering images of people.

If found to have broken the law, Ofcom can potentially issue X with a fine of up to 10% of its worldwide revenue or £18 million, whichever is greater.

And if X does not comply, Ofcom can seek a court order to force internet service providers to block access to the site in the UK altogether.

In a statement, Kendall urged the regulator not to take “months and months” to conclude its investigation, and demanded it set out a timeline “as soon as possible”.

It is currently illegal to share deepfakes of adults in the UK, but legislation in the Data (Use and Access) Act which would make it a criminal offence to create or request them has not been enforced until now, despite passing in June 2025.

Last week, campaigners accused the government of dragging its heels on implementing that law.

“Today I can announce to the House that this offence will be brought into force this week,” Kendall told MPs.

In addition to the Data Act, Kendall said she would also make it a “priority offence” in the Online Safety Act.

“The content which has circulated on X is vile. It’s not just an affront to decent society, it is illegal,” she said.

“Let me be crystal clear – under the Online Safety Act, sharing intimate images of people without their consent, or threatening to share them, including pictures of people in their underwear, is a criminal offence for individuals and for platforms.

“This means individuals are committing a criminal offence if they create or seek to create such content including on X, and anyone who does this should expect to face the full extent of the law.”

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Trump Says He Will Speak to Musk About Restoring Internet Access in Iran​

President Donald Trump said on Jan. 11 he was planning to speak with tech billionaire Elon Musk about restoring internet access in Iran after the regime blocked online services amid protests.

“As you know, he’s very good at that kind of thing. He’s got a very good company. So we may speak to Elon Musk, and heck, I’m going to call him as soon as I’m finished with you,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One.

Musk’s SpaceX company offers the Starlink service, which allows users access to the internet without any wired connection via a constellation of satellites surrounding Earth.

The flow of information from Iran has been hampered by an internet blackout since Jan. 8.

Neither Musk, who also owns social media platform X and electric car company Tesla, nor Starlink has yet commented publicly on Trump’s statement about the use of the technology in Iran.

The Epoch Times contacted SpaceX for comment but received no comment by publication time.

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Cloudflare Vs Italy: The Battle For Digital Freedom And Global Internet Sovereignty

Italian authorities are attempting to force the internet service provider Cloudflare to delete and block certain online services. Cloudflare is resisting and has turned to the U.S. government for support.

The fight for a free internet is intensifying.

The struggle over control of information, censorship, and economic dominance in the digital space is increasingly becoming a fundamental civilizational question. That the European Union now sees not only the EU Commission but also national governments and security apparatuses siding with information diktats, against the fundamental principle of free speech, sends a dangerous signal to the world. The EU has effectively withdrawn from the circle of freedom-oriented state actors.

Into this picture fits a recent report from Italy. A tweet by the founder and CEO of the internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, has caused a stir.

Prince reports that Cloudflare has been hit with a $17 million fine by a — as he calls it — clandestine cabal in Italy. The accusation: Cloudflare refused to participate in an Italian censorship mechanism at the behest of this group.

A Cabal of Regulators and Media Corporations

Specifically, this concerns a system controlled by the Italian media authority AGCOM (Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni) called the “Piracy Shield.” This blocking system is officially aimed at combating illegal sports and media streaming services. The main targets are the economic interests of major players such as Italy’s Serie A football league, Sky Italia, DAZN, Mediaset, and other large European media and rights corporations.

Private actors, comparable to the so-called “Trusted Flaggers” now familiar in Germany, operate on behalf of the Italian media sector within this system. They report websites, IP addresses, or suspicious domains to the Piracy Shield. The authority then compels internet service providers and infrastructure operators like Cloudflare to implement the corresponding blocks within just 30 minutes. Every advertising minute counts; piracy is indeed a dangerously significant economic factor. The question is: How do states and affected companies enforce copyright? Do they operate under the rule of law and avoid collateral damage, such as backdoor state censorship?

According to Prince, all of this happens without a judicial order or prior review, bypassing due legal process entirely. The measures affect not only allegedly illegal content but also deeply intrude into the technical infrastructure of the internet.

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Kentucky Launches Mobile ID App Amid Broader Push for Digital Identity and Age Verification Law

Kentucky has introduced a new Mobile ID app that allows residents to carry a state-issued digital ID on their smartphones.

The credential can currently be used at TSA checkpoints in select airports and is described as a voluntary digital version of a driver’s license or state ID for limited verification purposes.

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, which is overseeing the rollout, says the program is part of the state’s adoption of mobile driver’s license technology.

The digital ID is stored securely on the user’s phone and relies on encrypted Bluetooth connections for verification, removing the need to hand over a physical card.

At this stage, the credential is accepted only for TSA identity checks. The state has not indicated when or if it will expand to other uses such as traffic stops, public service access, or age-restricted purchases.

Kentucky officials have also stated that the app is not meant to serve as a full digital wallet but as a narrowly defined identification tool.

Governor Andy Beshear described the Mobile ID as “a secure and convenient option” for residents who wish to use it.

Transportation Cabinet Secretary Jim Gray noted that the digital version “reduces exposure of personal information” compared with showing a physical license.

The state has published detailed guidance explaining how to enroll, verify, and use the credential during airport screenings.

Kentucky’s Mobile ID app is not an isolated gadget for airport lines. It fits into a broader state effort to rethink how identity and age are confirmed in both physical and online settings.

This comes at a time when Kentucky lawmakers are actively expanding legal frameworks around age verification and digital identity across multiple fronts.

The Mobile ID lets residents carry a secure digital version of their driver’s license or state ID on a smartphone, currently usable at TSA checkpoints in participating airports.

The app’s design stores credentials locally on the device and uses encrypted Bluetooth to transmit only the necessary details for a verification task.

At the same time that the state is embracing mobile identity technology, lawmakers have enacted age verification legislation that applies to online activity.

Under House Bill 278, websites hosting adult content must verify that users are at least 18 years old before allowing access, which in practice has led some major adult sites to block access for Kentucky users rather than collect ID data online.

This law took effect in mid-2024 and reflects a legislative move to enforce age checks on digital platforms.

Kentucky’s digital identity initiative and its age verification law point toward a future where proving age and identity electronically may become more common in many contexts.

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