Today, 21 January 2026, the European Commission published its long-awaited proposal for a Digital Networks Act (DNA). Framed as a technical modernisation of Europe’s telecom rules, the proposal marks a decisive shift away from core principles that have safeguarded an open and neutral internet for almost a decade.
Chat Control has been haunting the chambers since 2021, and it’s in dormancy again as of November 2025. I don’t see how age checks benefit tech companies at all given they reduce their audience and the data for verification is required to be received by the government and denied to private entities. If you live in the EU, you’ve already given the government more information than that.
Besides starting to fine tech companies for violating the DMA, you also have the Digital Fairness Act proposal last year that we’ll soon see debating in Q3.
Age checks identify every account and every ip. Which is the point. Identified in a way that lower level government, business dickheads, hacker groups, and the tech companies running it along with other organized groups like intelligence agencies, can get their hands on the data if they try.
Chatcontrol was also not “dead” last I heard, they redesigned it for the umpteenth time, calling it voluntary, which it wasn’t I forget the tortured legal construction to allow them to call it “voluntary.”
The entire world is implementing stuff like this right now, all trying to implement new “ai” technology to surveil their populations.
On what data? All age verification does is attest that an IP is over a certain age; the European solution collects no information other than the boolean “Is user over <age>?”, the expiry date, and the issuing authority. I don’t know what you can do with data simply saying that the user isn’t browsing the internet “illegally”, since with age gating every user on the Internet is over that age. In our present time of dynamic/private IPs, the operator behind the IP (and consequently their age) changes constantly anyways, meaning that little data is constantly invalidated.
Chat Control is “dormant”. It’s been amended, re-proposed, and then put back on the backburner for umpteenth times, including this time. It’s definitely a threat, I agree, but nothing about it has become more eager in 2025.
Forcing everyone to identify themselves with ID and or likeness, to private companies, ID’s every account and IP, and everything done under that recorded, and AI sorting it all. Do you really not know what is going on here? You think the information won’t be held by anyone?
Intelligence already has that information too to a degree. This would be accessible to lower level government, like political appointees, to silicon valley doing the verification, to the police, you name it, no matter what they tell you.
You do realize some of the verification is sending video of you, and or sending in ID. If you don’t see a problem with that, I could not help but think your fear center is impaired somehow.
Again, the EU age verification is not done by private companies. It’s open source, the specifications are out, and it’s run by the government. Companies that access the attestation only learn whether the user/shifting IP is above the age of majority. They cannot get your ID.
Government knowing the id of every account is the danger, and they will keep that informstion, and feed it in ai threat detection.
Have you ever been tested for taxoplasmosis?