Sep 25, 2026 · 18 min
Age checks could remake the internet for everyone
Who gets to decide what teens can do online?
Laws meant to protect minors may normalize invasive identity systems while limiting young people’s access to information, communities, and speech.
- 1State age-verification laws can impose privacy, security, access, and financial costs on users and online publishers.
- 2Infrastructure built to distinguish children from adults could expand into broader identity checks and speech regulation.
- 3Protecting minors requires weighing safety against their First Amendment rights and ability to participate online.
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Eric Goldman connects age-verification infrastructure to the possibility of broader identity checks and online speech regulation.
The brief
The internet still lacks a settled answer to a basic question: what rights do minors have online, and who gets to decide where childhood ends?
Eric Goldman explains how new state laws, including Texas requirements involving app stores and parental permission, turn age verification into a practical and costly problem.
Age checks can demand sensitive personal disclosures, create security risks, add friction, shrink audiences, and burden online publishers—costs that extend beyond children.
The central warning is infrastructural: systems built to verify age could evolve into identity checks that enable broader regulation of online speech.
The episode closes on the tradeoff policymakers must confront: protecting children without cutting them off from information, communities, opportunities, and self-actualization.