is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
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How it started
Back in 2018, two years after the UK government decided to implement mandatory hard age gates on adult websites, it floated an idea called the “porn pass.” The porn pass was a physical card you’d buy by handing over your ID to a brick-and-mortar shop attendant. It would contain authentication information that would act as a low-tech anonymization system, letting you verify you were over 18 years old online without entering personal details.
The idea of having to get internet porn by visiting a corner shop was largely considered funny. It revealed the tortured lengths regulators had stretched to balance their plan with the inevitable risks to privacy, inadvertently demonstrating how difficult that balance was in the process. Few were surprised when the whole verification project was scrapped in 2019, seemingly for good.
But the age verification wars were just beginning, and this year proponents have been chalking up win after win. The UK’s Online Safety Act now mandates age-gating on much of social media in addition to porn sites. The EU and Australia are currently trialing age verification measures and they’re hotly debated in other countries, including Canada. The US Supreme Court has overturned a decades-old precedent by greenlighting adult content age verification and at least temporarily allowing such requirements for social media. Critics who warned of threats to privacy and free speech have had their fears largely disregarded. Companies that once objected have started to comply.
What happened between 2019 and 2025? Arguably, a major factor is simply that the internet has taken over more and more of our lives and lots of people are souring on it. Critics of age verification long emphasized that even if you didn’t care about pure “know it when I see it” smut, you should worry that age verification laws would prevent children from reaching valuable educational resources while making adults hesitant to access meaningful speech on the internet. But a growing constituency across the political spectrum seems dubious there’s much of value online at all.
How it’s going
Early age verification launches are vindicating many of those critics’ warnings, at least in the short term. The UK’s splashy OSA rollout created a rapid demonstration of nearly every problem age verification poses. There was a thicket of different services to give an ID or facial scan to, each one creating a fresh security risk if a breach occurred. There were trivially simple circumvention methods, like video game photo modes. There was a flood of VPN usage followed by ominous (though so far denied) questions about VPN bans. And there were social networks blocking content many people believed was appropriate and worthwhile for minors, plus a number of small sites that chose to leave the country.
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