Age-verification systems require collecting sensitive data to support the biometric information. In no time, the internet will become a fully surveilled digital panopticon

Over the past year, more than two dozen countries around the world have proposed bans on social media use for vast swathes of their public. These laws, often proposed under the guise of “child safety”, are ushering in an era of mass surveillance and widespread censorship, contributing to what scholars have called a “global free speech recession”.

Last year, Australia became the first country to ban anyone under the age of 16 from accessing social media. The move emboldened other countries around the world to quickly follow suit. Germany’s ruling party announced it was backing a social media ban. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, called for a ban on social media for under-15s. In the UK, Keir Starmer has sought to enact sweeping social media bans. Greece, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Japan have also pursued similar online identity verification laws.

Taylor Lorenz is a technology journalist who writes the newsletter User Mag and is the author of the bestselling book Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet

BRUSSELS — Governments should halt plans to roll out age checks on online services until privacy and security concerns are addressed, hundreds of academics said Monday.

The warning comes as countries around the world move to bar children from social media, which requires some way of checking users’ ages to decide if they can access online services. In an open letter, 371 security and privacy academics across 29 countries said the technologies being rolled out are not effective and carry significant risks.

As companies including OpenAI, Roblox and Discord implement age checks in anticipation of being obliged to, the signatories said it is “dangerous and socially unacceptable to introduce a large-scale access control mechanism without a clear understanding of the implications” for security, privacy and people’s freedom and autonomy.

They are calling instead for a global pause “until the scientific consensus settles on the benefits and harms that age-assurance technologies can bring, and on the technical feasibility.” The signatories include Ronald Rivest, winner of the prestigious Turing Award in computing, and Bart Preneel, president of the International Association for Cryptologic Research.

France is planning to ban kids under 15 from social media as soon as September, while Germany, Denmark and Spain are also accelerating efforts. Australia became the first country in the world to introduce a ban in December 2025. Many leaders have expressed support on the basis it would protect children’s physical and mental health, but countries have yet to decide how bans would be implemented or enforced.

“We share the concerns about the negative effects that exposure to harmful content online has on children,” the academics write. But current plans “would require all users — minors and adults — to prove their age to converse with friends and family, read news, or search for information; well beyond what has ever happened in our offline lives.”

A robust age verification system would require checking “government-issued IDs with strong cryptographic protection for every single interaction with the service,” the academics write. Such infrastructure is not only hard to build and maintain on a global scale, but would add friction in services, meaning many providers would refuse to install age checks.

Using technologies like cryptography to solve the problem risks centralizing tools in the hands of the few companies that can deploy them at scale, the experts warn.

They also warn of the risks that governments would ban virtual private networks to stop people from getting around age bans. VPNs are frequently used by people looking to protect their identities from authoritarian regimes.

In Gorton and Denton, I heard again and again that people wanted seismic political change – Labour and the Tories are no longer part of that conversation

In the wake of Labour’s third-place showing at last Thursday’s Gorton and Denton byelection, Keir Starmer could have responded with a mixture of magnanimity, grit, and a clear appreciation of what had just happened.

He might have congratulated the Green party’s new MP Hannah Spencer, and insisted that the themes of inequality and everyday struggle she had so loudly emphasised throughout the campaign were at the top of his government’s priorities. He could also have combined that message with a show of determination to learn from the defeat and win back the voters his party lost, and an acknowledgment that Labour’s recent calamities and internal bickering had sent those people completely the wrong signals.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

There’s no end of analysis paralysis on Gorton and Denton, so I’ll keep this post brief. A first section on what it means for Labour and a second on the altogether stunning commentary on the rise of “sectarianism” in British politics.

Clearly, for Keir Starmer this result lessens whatever remains of his political authority. It was the Prime Minister who set the test for British politics in his conference speech last year. He argued, unwisely as I wrote at the time, that the Conservatives were finished and that the battle was between Labour and Reform. He set the essay question of politics as a technical one: who would be best to beat Farage? His implicit pitch to progressive voters was that you may not love me, but that you’ll really hate the alternative. In this, he set himself up as a curious mix of Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron.

As of this morning, he looks more like François Hollande. A leader of a mainstream centre-left party, who through a lack of vision, programme and communicative ability, sees his party haemorrhage votes to insurgents on his left and right. He has weakened himself because he is failing his own test. Voters appear to be adjudging that he was wrong: he is neither the only alternative nor the one who can best beat Farage. Partly because he distrusts ideas, Starmer has a habit of describing his political purpose in instrumentalist terms: he will be more competent, he will be less chaotic, he will be more managerial. His being the best vehicle to defeat Farage, by virtue of being the biggest anti-Farage party was the latest such wheeze and attempt to find purpose. The problem with this approach is that all of them are easy binaries- as soon as you’re not that thing, you’re instantly sunk. Ideas can’t be easily defeated. Instrumentalism can.

Weirdly, for a while at least, a Green surge might keep Starmer in place, for longer. Labour have had a poor electoral record these last 15 years, especially in old heartlands. But they’ve quietly built up new ones: becoming the hegemonic force in urban, progressive, metropolitan England. For the first time since the Iraq war Lib Dem surge, that is now seriously threatened. That will scare scores of Labour MPs who have become accustomed to weighing votes. If a leadership election were held now, the essay question therefore for Labour will not be, who can defeat Farage, but who can defeat Polanski. That will in turn scare the Labour right, who will cling to Starmer for fear of who might replace him. By-election dynamics are not replicable at a general election, and Polanski’s Greens have much work to do to neutralise problems, especially on defence and foreign policy. But make no mistake, the winds blown by Gorton and Denton voters will work their way through the Labour Party.

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Meanwhile, we see the right of British politics engaging in one almighty sulk. Reform performed well but not nearly as well as they might have done if their rise were as unassailable as has been talked about. Matthew Goodwin, their eccentric candidate for the seat, blamed his victory not on his performance or views but simply on “sectarianism.” Kemi Badenoch (whose Conservatives scored minor party status at less than 2% of the Gorton vote) went further. She issued a dark statement, kicking off with: “Labour created the monster of harvesting Muslim community bloc votes and yesterday that monster came back to bite them.” Much of the right in British politics has spent the morning talking about Muslim voters as if they are some sort of fifth column.

We need to separate out two distinct things here. There have been allegations of violations of the secret ballot in Gorton and “family voting.” This must be investigated as a potential serious problem. That goes for any violations of electoral law. There are pockets of Britain where clan, machine or braidhri politics have proven problematic, sometimes leading to electoral fraud. We shouldn’t be dewy eyed about this. I reported on it at Newsnight and wherever it happens it should be rooted out.

But the accusations we’re seeing go over and above that. We hear politicians and commentators suggesting that Muslims- uniquely- tend to vote as a group, and that that is illegitimate, wrong or dangerous. Absurdly, I’ve even seem the claim that it is the first time we’ve seen sectarian politics in Britain. Residents of Belfast, or Derry, or Glasgow, or Liverpool might have something to say about that. In fact it is completely normal, across democracies, for minorities to tend to vote in one direction. Yet it only seems to be problem, for these people, when Muslims are the ones doing it.

Was it sectarian when the Church of England used to be described as the “Tory Party at prayer?”. Or when the Liberal Party represented nonconformist interests? Was it sectarian when Labour aggressively courted Catholic votes in Glasgow and Liverpool? Is it sectarian when the Conservative Party courts British Indian voters, something they’ve very successfully done in recent years? Is it sectarian when they did the same with Jewish voters at the height of Labour’s problems over anti-Semitism? Was any of this wrong? The danger is not that minorities vote together. This is normal. The danger is when politicians decide that only some minorities are allowed to. British Muslims, like any other demographic group, tend to vote where they perceive their interests — economic, social or foreign policy — are best represented. That is coalition politics, not confessional politics.

Extraordinarily, I’ve heard politicians express bafflement and even disgust that the Green Party campaigned over Gaza and that voters chose to vote over the issue. That is quite literally what democracy is. It is a marketplace and the voters are the buyers. The real democratic question is not whether communities mobilise, but whether party structures remain transparent, meritocratic and open — something every party, in every era, has struggled to guarantee.

Right now, we have a situation where much of British politics consistently tells us that Islam and Muslims are a problem, or incompatible with British society and democracy, and then express fury when those same people choose not to vote for them. To put it another way, Reform and Conservative seem to have decided they don’t want to bother with British Muslims. They cannot be surprised when they decide they don’t wish to bother with them.

Iran is slowly emerging from the most severe communications blackout in its history and one of the longest in the world. Triggered as part of January’s government crackdown against citizen protests nationwide, the regime implemented an internet shutdown that transcends the standard definition of internet censorship. This was not merely blocking social media or foreign websites; it was a total communications shutdown.

Unlike previous Iranian internet shutdowns where Iran’s domestic intranet—the National Information Network (NIN)—remained functional to keep the banking and administrative sectors running, the 2026 blackout disrupted local infrastructure as well. Mobile networks, text messaging services, and landlines were disabled—even Starlink was blocked. And when a few domestic services became available, the state surgically removed social features, such as comment sections on news sites and chat boxes in online marketplaces. The objective seems clear. The Iranian government aimed to atomize the population, preventing not just the flow of information out of the country but the coordination of any activity within it.

This escalation marks a strategic shift from the shutdown observed during the “12-Day War” with Israel in mid-2025. Then, the government primarily blocked particular types of traffic while leaving the underlying internet remaining available. The regime’s actions this year entailed a more brute-force approach to internet censorship, where both the physical and logical layers of connectivity were dismantled.

The ability to disconnect a population is a feature of modern authoritarian network design. When a government treats connectivity as a faucet it can turn off at will, it asserts that the right to speak, assemble, and access information is revocable. The human right to the internet is not just about bandwidth; it is about the right to exist within the modern public square. Iran’s actions deny its citizens this existence, reducing them to subjects who can be silenced—and authoritarian governments elsewhere are taking note.

The current blackout is not an isolated panic reaction but a stress test for a long-term strategy, say advocacy groups—a two-tiered or “class-based” internet known as Internet-e-Tabaqati. Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace, the country’s highest internet policy body, has been laying the legal and technical groundwork for this since 2009.

In July 2025, the council passed a regulation formally institutionalizing a two-tiered hierarchy. Under this system, access to the global internet is no longer a default for citizens, but instead a privilege granted based on loyalty and professional necessity. The implementation includes such things as “white SIM cards“: special mobile lines issued to government officials, security forces, and approved journalists that bypass the state’s filtering apparatus entirely.

While ordinary Iranians are forced to navigate a maze of unstable VPNs and blocked ports, holders of white SIMs enjoy unrestricted access to Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp. This tiered access is further enforced through whitelisting at the data center level, creating a digital apartheid where connectivity is a reward for compliance. The regime’s goal is to make the cost of a general shutdown manageable by ensuring that the state and its loyalists remain connected while plunging the public into darkness. (In the latest shutdown, for instance, white SIM holders regained connectivity earlier than the general population.)

The technical architecture of Iran’s shutdown reveals its primary purpose: social control through isolation. Over the years, the regime has learned that simple censorship—blocking specific URLs—is insufficient against a tech-savvy population armed with circumvention tools. The answer instead has been to build a “sovereign” network structure that allows for granular control.

By disabling local communication channels, the state prevents the “swarm” dynamics of modern unrest, where small protests coalesce into large movements through real-time coordination. In this way, the shutdown breaks the psychological momentum of the protests. The blocking of chat functions in nonpolitical apps (like ridesharing or shopping platforms) illustrates the regime’s paranoia: Any channel that allows two people to exchange text is seen as a threat.

The United Nations and various international bodies have increasingly recognized internet access as an enabler of other fundamental human rights. In the context of Iran, the internet is the only independent witness to history. By severing it, the regime creates a zone of impunity where atrocities can be committed without immediate consequence.

Iran’s digital repression model is distinct from, and in some ways more dangerous than, China’s “Great Firewall.” China built its digital ecosystem from the ground up with sovereignty in mind, creating domestic alternatives like WeChat and Weibo that it fully controls. Iran, by contrast, is building its controls on top of the standard global internet infrastructure.

Unlike China’s censorship regime, Iran’s overlay model is highly exportable. It demonstrates to other authoritarian regimes that they can still achieve high levels of control by retrofitting their existing networks. We are already seeing signs of “authoritarian learning,” where techniques tested in Tehran are being studied by regimes in unstable democracies and dictatorships alike. The most recent shutdown in Afghanistan, for example, was more sophisticated than previous ones. If Iran succeeds in normalizing tiered access to the internet, we can expect to see similar white SIM policies and tiered access models proliferate globally.

The international community must move beyond condemnation and treat connectivity as a humanitarian imperative. A coalition of civil society organizations has already launched a campaign calling for “direct-to-cell” (D2C) satellite connectivity. Unlike traditional satellite internet, which requires conspicuous and expensive dishes such as Starlink terminals, D2C technology connects directly to standard smartphones and is much more resilient to infrastructure shutdowns. The technology works; all it requires is implementation.

This is a technological measure, but it has a strong policy component as well. Regulators should require satellite providers to include humanitarian access protocols in their licensing, ensuring that services can be activated for civilians in designated crisis zones. Governments, particularly the United States, should ensure that technology sanctions do not inadvertently block the hardware and software needed to circumvent censorship. General licenses should be expanded to cover satellite connectivity explicitly. And funding should be directed toward technologies that are harder to whitelist or block, such as mesh networks and D2C solutions that bypass the choke points of state-controlled ISPs.

Deliberate internet shutdowns are commonplace throughout the world. The 2026 shutdown in Iran is a glimpse into a fractured internet. If we are to end countries’ ability to limit access to the rest of the world for their populations, we need to build resolute architectures. They don’t solve the problem, but they do give people in repressive countries a fighting chance.

This essay originally appeared in Foreign Policy.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” said George Santayana. Such has been the fate of Sir Keir Starmer, who recently said:

My experience as Prime Minister is of frustration that every time I go to pull a lever, there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations and arm’s length bodies that mean the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be, which is among the reasons I want to cut down on regulation generally and within Government.

He is not of course the first minister to discover this. The diaries of Tony Benn and Richard Crossman express frustration at the difficulty of getting things done. And in 1999 Tony Blair spoke of having “scars on my back” from trying to reform public services. Writing in 2008 David Richards, David Blunkett and Helen Mathers described (pdf) three decades of frustration with policy-making:

A minister might pull a policy lever only to discover later that it has not had the desired effect.

In believing that there are such levers politicians are following some defunct economist. In 1949 Bill Phillips built a machine which, he thought, represented the economy. Partly, it did; it showed the circular flow of income and it reminded us that the economy is not an act of nature but a creation of humankind - and what humans can create they can change. But partly it did not, as it omitted important things such as inequality, environmental degradation, supply shocks, growth and innovation.

Polly McKenzie draws an inference from all this - that the “levers of government” is an unhelpful dead metaphor:

The economy is not a thing but an aggregation of billions of decisions, each made on the basis of incentives, opportunities and desires...Government has tools, it’s just that they are not mechanically connected into that system like a lever is.

Giles Wilkes agrees:

All physical analogies for working on the economy are misleading and imply the sort of direct causality, measurability, clear categories and obvious relationships that barely ever applies.

They’re right.

But, but, but. As George Lakoff has shown, metaphorical thinking is ubiquitous. When we confront abstractions such as the economy, politics, nature, or moral questions, we use metaphors to try to make sense of them. Asking us to forego all metaphors is a counsel of perfection. Metaphors are like models (in fact, models are metaphors): all are wrong, but some are useful in some contexts.

On the basis that it takes a metaphor to kill a metaphor, but subject to that caveat, I’d suggest an alternative - to regard the economy and society not as a machine but as a garden.

For one thing, you do not make a garden just as you choose. You cannot simply impose a vision. What you grow depends upon the type of soil; how much sun you get; how long your growing season is; how much space you have and so on. You need to work with what you’ve got, not against it. It’s similar in policy-making. You need to work with and through civil servants, not merely rail against the “blob”. And you must remember Burke’s words:

Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

This was one way in which Truss went wrong. Fiscally expansionary tax cuts might have worked in a depression. But they didn’t when markets were worrying about inflation. The circumstances rendered her scheme noxious.

Truss is mad, but this government is guilty of something similar. The UK economy’s comparative advantage lies to a large degree in higher education and crreative industries; these are some of our garden’s most succesful plants. But the government is putting weedkiller onto these by taxing overseas students; allowing nibmys to close down music venues; making it harder for musicians to tour Europe; and allowing tech companies to steal writers’ work. Meanwhile it is also trying to grow flowers that are not well-suited by subsiding steel and chemical industries, like trying to grow a mediterranean garden in north-facing clay soil.

“Cut your losers and run your winners” applies in gardening as well as investing. The government seems not to realize this.

Both gardening and policy-making are forms of guided emergence. Societies are the product of human actions but not of human design, which is why the machine metaphor is at best only half-right. Similarly, gardeners cannot easily predict exactly how their garden will look because of course the weather (among other things) will intervene. What they can do is simply create the best chances for plants to thrive by feeding and watering them properly, and putting them in the right light and soil. So it is with governments. They can provide the right conditions for a thriving people and economy (to a much greater extent than it is actually doing so now) but they cannot guarantee that they will indeed thrive.

This is not to say that conditions are always a binding constraint. Gardeners prepare soil by mulching and composting, or improving the drainage of clay soils or by changing the acidity of the soil. Good politicians do something similar; they know that public opinion is not a fixed datum but is something malleable. In Thinking the Unthinkable Richard Cockett describes how thinktanks such as the IEA and CPS spent years preparing the ideological ground for Thatcherism. And Thatcher herself did not immediately embark upon that project; it was not until her second term of office that she began serious privatization and attacks on the NUM. You must plant at the right time.

Her epigones, however, have not been so wise. Osborne and Cameron failed to cut the size of the state in part because they never made a serious ideological case for doing so or had a means of identifying genuine waste, instead hiding behind mindless drivel about the “nation’s credit card”. And Starmer did not devote enough effort in opposition to undertanding just how effort much is needed to repair the economy and public services.

Some constraints are binding; the neighbour’s fence or the position of the sun. Others are not so much. Equally, politicians must know what’s a binding constraint and what isn’t.

A further parallel between gardening and politics is that in both, change takes time. All gardeners know the need for patience, if only because it can take years for plants to grow. The same is true of social change. Shifting tens of thousands of people from some jobs to others takes a long time. One of the right’s consistent errors has been to under-appreciate this. Just as it was wrong to think unemployed miners in the 80s would soon find new jobs, so it wrongly though that companies could quickly divert trade efforts from the EU to non-EU countries. But economies and people don’t work this way. Change takes time.

Which leads to another similarity between gardening and policy-making. Gardens are almost never perfect; there are always some plants that aren’t (yet) thriving. Similarly, there is, as Adam Smith said, “a great deal of ruin in a nation.” Which is inevitable, because there are trade-offs. Do you want a benefit system that errs on the side of generosity or meanness? Do you want efficient public services or ones that have some slack in them to respond to emergencies? Do you want a simple tax system with some inequities, or a more complicated one with deadweight costs?

Some things, therefore, we must just live with. In gardening, said Gertrude Jekyll, “one has not only to acquire a knowledge of what to do, but also to gain some wisdom in perceiving what it is well to let alone.” At this time of year, for example, it’s tempting to start weeding - and in doing so to dig up perennials by accident. Echoing her, the late John Cushnie would often tell listeners to Gardeners’ Question Time: “it’s not worth the bother.” Politicians, by contrast, rarely heed this, preferring, in Jaap Stam’s words, to be “busy cunts.”

There’s one more similarity. Gardening isn’t only about enouraging growth. We also need to destroy things - to kill weeds and pests; to prune branches; and even to cut out whole plants. Sometimes, we need a chainsaw.

The same is true of politics: you must not only cultivate client groups but also weaken or destroy opposing interests, as Thatcher, for example, attacked trades unions. Politics isn’t only about technocratic fixes, hawking product like market traders, and TV soundbites. It is about forming and weakening interest groups.

In this respect, Shakespeare knew more than we know today, our brains having been addled by moronic current affairs shows. In Richard II he has a gardener say of Richard:

O, what pity is it
That he had not so trimmed and dressed his land
As we this garden! We at time of year
Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit trees,
Lest, being overproud in sap and blood,
With too much riches it confound itself.
Had he done so to great and growing men,
They might have lived to bear and he to taste
Their fruits of duty. Superfluous branches
We lop away, that bearing boughs may live.
Had he done so, himself had borne the crown,
Which waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down (Act 3 scene 4).

And Bolingbroke spoke of as enemies as pests:

But we must win your Grace to go with us
To Bristow Castle, which they say is held
By Bushy, Bagot, and their complices,
The caterpillars of the commonwealth,
Which I have sworn to weed and pluck away. (Act 2 scene 3)

He had them killed. Like nature, politics is and has to be red in tooth and claw.