A natural follow on from the under 16 social media bans.

I remember when we used to laugh at the restrictions China had on the internet, yet we're happily walking down the same path.

This is fucking disgusting, the end of the internet as we know it

This is REALLY bad. It'll require your age be verified by your ISP, operating system, email, search engine, and the site you visit. Fines of up to $49.5 million if violated.

If this is real, it is straight-up totalitarian.

Haven't seen much scrutiny over the "landmark" report released by the government a couple of weeks ago which forms the basis for the practical implementation of this system.

https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/department/media/publications/age-assurance-technology-trial-final-report

It's not an academic study from a trusted institution or even just an established think tank, but from an organisation that sort of popped up out of nowhere some years ago which appears to provide paid certification services for age assurance companies, while also evidently offering "research" for governments on the viability of implementing these schemes. They'd previously done a similar report for the UK government, which makes me rather cynical about our government's motivations in choosing them. The news reporting on its release was a bit strange as it made it sound like the report was quite sceptical, but you don't need to spend much time looking at it to see it's very much telling the government what it wanted to hear (given they'd already committed to implementing such a scheme).

The companies people will be required to provide their documents/biometrics to also kind of popped up out of nowhere, and these are the sorts of folks behind them: https://bylinetimes.com/2025/07/31/the-online-safety-act-is-forcing-brits-to-hand-over-personal-data-to-unregulated-overseas-corporations-with-questionable-privacy-records/

Goddamn tech bros bought the whole fucking world. Boring dystopia.

Where are the Zero-knowledge (zk) implementations of this. It's possible in crypto land...

Thanks everyone for voting for the e-karen.

Wanna bet politicians are gonna make an exemption for themselves? Just like insider trading.

What the actual fuck looking at that list. She's set it up so anyone can fucking mine you. Theres insane amounts of redundancy.

the only one i like is the ISP. If you provide your age to your isp, then you don't need anything else.

Australians soon engaging in wider spread adoption of VPN and tor usage.

I forsee open directories and data hordes becoming popular

Im surprised this is the first Ive heard, and so little response. Who do we petition, when's the march?

Inshitification of the Internet, who would have thought.

I wonder what it would take now to ditch the internet like one would do when ditching Facebook for example.

Don't they already check if user is over 16 if he wants to sign up for mainstream social media?

And why the fuck does the govt. not provide the age verification tools? This is the insane part.

Eventually a network decentralized on an infrastructure level, like a meshnet or satellite network where each satellite is controlled and owned by an individual, will be the only way to freely transmit digital information. Sending a CubeSat to LEO costs about $30k these days and will probably get cheaper as technology improves. I think a community run decentralized satellite network accessible via local meshnet through on-ground satellite-connected nodes will be the next step in the fight against censorship. As long as governments control the cables our data flows through, they won't stop trying to control it.

"Are u in Australia?"

[Yes] [No]

[X] Remember my answer

It's obviously a global push. I expect no country is going to be spared draconian identity verification rules in the near future.

This has already happened here in the UK, a cheap VPN fixes it