How “Protecting Children” laws are becoming a Trojan Horse for authoritarian control online

Legislation like the UK’s Online Safety Act, passed in October 2023, was portrayed as a modern shield against online harm, imposing new duties on platforms to protect minors and curtail illegal content. Its scope is broad, empowering regulators such as Ofcom to enforce age verification, content restrictions, and risk assessments on a range of services. Proponents argue this is necessary to protect children from violence, self harm content, and exploitation, yet civil liberties groups have been warning that this law carries latent threats to free expression and privacy, in part because of the mechanisms required to implement “safety” at scale.

What observers warned about in broad terms is now manifesting in specific regulatory impulses targeting privacy technologies that citizens often use for completely legitimate purposes: VPNs, long considered part of the modern internet’s privacy fabric, have suddenly become a target in multiple jurisdictions, denounced as both a tool of child evasion and, in some proposals, a facilitator of piracy.

The UK’s implementation of the Online Safety Act has provided a real time case study in how these dynamics play out once legislation becomes operational.

Britain labels its new internet safety regime as a child protection measure and such mentality has now broadened into a global pattern extending across the European Union, Australia, and beyond. What was sold as a seemingly benign effort to shield children from harmful content risks becoming a pretext for governments to empower surveillance, erode privacy, and control speech in ways that resemble authoritarian models more than democratic safeguards. In fact, the authoritarian path is clear.

The latest skirmishes in this unfolding battle are over VPNs, tools used to secure web traffic and mask users’ locations. Critics of VPNs claim they allow minors to evade age gating and access prohibited content, but the governmental response, a push to ban or regulate VPNs, signals something much more profound than merely closing loopholes.

When child safety duties came into force in the summer of 2025, half of the top ten app downloads in the UK were VPNs or identity verification tools. Proton VPN reported a surge of more than 1,400 percent in sign ups within minutes of the law taking effect. The government’s response to this mass turn toward privacy tools was not to reflect on the unintended consequences of its own legislation it was to treat VPN use as a circumvention problem requiring further enforcement.

In the UK, Members of Parliament have explicitly moved to bring VPN providers into the scope of the Online Safety Act debate, arguing they should be required to implement age verification systems and monitor user traffic to ensure compliance with content laws. This would, in effect, force VPNs to log or disclose information that fundamentally contradicts their core purpose of protecting user identity.

Even across the House of Lords, amendments have been tabled that would prohibit under 18s from using VPNs and force providers to use “highly effective” age assurance mechanisms, potentially including government ID checks or facial scans. Such measures are eerily reminiscent of mass surveillance frameworks, where anonymity and encryption are gradually eroded in the name of “safety.”

No matter how carefully policymakers dress their language in the rhetoric of child welfare, mandating that a privacy tool collect or verify personal data violates user privacy and significantly reduces choice for citizens who rely on VPNs for legitimate personal and professional reasons.

In Australia, where the first legislation to prevent children under 16 to access social media has come into force, the government expects platforms to prevent minors from using VPN without specifying how or even if it’s in fact possible.

Meanwhile, in Denmark, a proposed bill aimed at cracking down on online piracy controversially included provisions to restrict VPN use to access geo blocked or illegal online content. Although the Danish government has since backed away from outright criminalisation under public pressure, the mere proposal sparked significant alarm among privacy advocates.

These developments reflect a wider trend, the conflation of child protection, intellectual property enforcement, and digital control. Under these intertwined agendas user privacy is compromised, choice is narrowed and speech is ultimately controlled.

Requiring age verification or traffic monitoring undermines encryption and anonymity, which are essential for digital rights, journalists, activists, and vulnerable populations alike, at the same time, as governments push for compliance with age gates, platforms may be incentivized or compelled to adopt invasive verification technologies, leaving users with limited options for privacy preserving access.

Finally, when access tools like VPNs are regulated or restricted, both geographical and political openness are curtailed. Citizens cannot freely access information or express dissent if every online action is potentially logged or examined.

The philosophical underpinning of these policies is the belief that states can and should control the digital environment “for the children.” But safety mechanisms that require pervasive monitoring, whether of age, content, or circumvention tools, are functionally identical to the surveillance architectures seen in authoritarian systems, where privacy is sacrificed for state control.

These legislative impulses risk establishing a digital ecosystem in which privacy technologies are subordinate to state mandates, where speech and access are controlled under broad and vaguely defined safety umbrellas. Not to mention that particularly in the case of child protection, forcing platforms to accept oversight, giving tools for parents to actually be in charge of their children, promoting digital literacy, and discussing algorithmic governance would have a much greater effect.

But addressing algorithms means confronting the business model of the platforms themselves. Engagement driven recommendation systems the engines that amplify extreme, sensational, or misleading content are also the engines of Big Tech’s profitability. Challenging them would mean regulating the economic incentives at the heart of the digital economy, a step many policymakers appear unwilling to take. Instead, regulatory energy is directed toward expanding monitoring and control mechanisms. If child protection were truly the priority, the focus would shift toward the algorithmic systems and commercial incentives that shape the online information environment.

Protecting children online is undeniably important but using that imperative as a justification for sweeping surveillance and control undermines the very liberties democratic societies claim to uphold. What emerges from this accumulation of cases is not a series of isolated policy experiments but a convergent model the use of child safety as a politically unassailable justification for surveillance infrastructure that once built is rarely dismantled and almost never confined to its original purpose.