The Internet in 2026: Open by Default or Locked by Law?

What New Year's resolutions did you come up with for 2026? I, personally, plan to drink more water and spend less time on my phone, just like I say I will every year. And while I will probably fail these resolutions, governments around the globe are pretty committed when it comes to their plans for 2026: make the internet “safer for children” while butchering the online freedoms that we’ve come to expect every time we pick up our phones and laptops.

Made for Freedom

Back when the internet was first created in 1983, it was seen as a monumental achievement, a trailblazing technology that enabled like-minded people worldwide to connect, to build communities, to learn new things, and to discover what life was like for people outside of their bedrooms or state lines. Sadly, the pink colored glasses had to fall off sooner rather than later, because if humans are good at anything, it’s ruining a good thing.

In 1995, a man named Chris Lamprecht was banned from the internet after being convicted of money laundering. In the following years, after the advent of inappropriate content, deemed harmful to young people, a variety of laws were passed to prevent lewd material, including child sexual abuse material, from circulating in the depths of the web. Laws like The Child Pornography Prevention Act (1996) and The Child Online Protection Act (1998) were amongst the first laws passed to regulate people’s online activity in order to protect vulnerable kids online. And they wouldn’t be the last. 

By the early 2000s, instead of banning people or policing individual behavior, lawmakers increasingly leaned on platforms to act as gatekeepers. Social media companies introduced age limits. Thirteen became the magic number. In theory, children younger weren’t allowed to sign up, but responsibility for enforcement was largely symbolic. 

Platforms asked people to self-report their age, parents were expected to supervise, and everyone knew deep down that this system relied on trust. Oh, how laughably naive we all were, trusting platforms and lawmakers to actually protect us rather than harvest our data while pretending to care. Incidentally, I know I wasn’t the only one who simply subtracted 13 from the current year to easily create a Facebook account.

If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It?

For years, that arrangement worked just fine. Governments boasted that children were safe, platforms avoided intrusive data collection, and users maintained relatively unrestricted access to their beloved online spaces. The rules existed, but enforcement was intentionally light. The internet was mostly open by default. But good times come to an end, and online freedom isn’t an exception. For years, platforms relied on trust rather than technical enforcement. But as of 2025, that trust is no longer enough: governments are demanding proof, not promises.

2025 saw a global upsurge of sweeping laws designed to protect vulnerable kids from the big, scary risks of the online world through creepily unsafe means, namely, age and identity verification. From Australia to like half of the states in the U.S., websites and online services are now required to verify that visitors are of age. 

How can you do that? Oh, of course, by simply handing over your most sensitive data (like government-issued IDs and biometric data) to unknown third parties that pinky promise to ensure your most personal information will be safe and sound. Until a whoopsie happens and it suddenly isn’t, right 5CA? Oh, if you hadn’t heard, Discord named this vendor, which was responsible for identity verification to access Discord, as the party responsible for exposing the personal information and ID photos of more than 70,000 users worldwide in October. 5CA, obviously, denies any wrongdoing. 

New Internet Era

In 2026, similar age verification requirements are only expected to expand. Who needs online safety and reasonable levels of personal privacy anymore, right? If you want to visit the websites you love, you’ll have no other choice but to keep your mouth shut and your passport open. I, for one, am not a fan of sharing my ID with anyone and everyone, and not just because I don’t look good in the passport photo. Because I do.

These laws are a sad, yet fantastic illustration of what’s been called techno-legal solutionism, or “the practice of embracing a seductively simple solution to the online risks for youth by mandating technical fixes to social media platforms.” Basically, instead of allocating time, money, and effort to figure out ways to make the internet safer for kids without sacrificing the privacy and security of everyone else, governments just put a Band-Aid on it with age verification. 

Ensuring kids are safe is noble, alright, but forcing everyone else to take part in mass data collection is a horrifically wrong way to do it. Because nothing says ‘we care about kids’ like giving strangers your biometric data and hoping for the best. And yet, that’s exactly the direction policy is taking. What began as an attempt to protect children now threatens everyone’s online privacy and autonomy, from the teenager on Instagram to the adult reading a blog or enjoying legally age-restricted content.

So, What’s Next?

Age verification is the new normal. Australia’s under-16 social media ban has forced Meta to delete over half a million accounts. Half of the U.S. states now require platforms to verify people’s age or restrict access. The UK’s Online Safety Act is pushing platforms to implement facial age estimation and ID-based checks to access entire categories of content. 

Meanwhile, the EU is actively toying with a standardized age-verification framework that would work across member states, basically normalizing identity checks as a prerequisite for being online at all. These laws may differ in language, but they share a common idea: the safest internet is one where your participation is dependent on proving who you are.

It’s not just countries that are trying to helicopter-parent how their citizens are using the internet. OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, recently announced that his AI will stop babying adults and allow them to enjoy erotica if they’re over 18 years old. The only way to do that? Age verification. Want to enjoy some tasteful pornography? Hand over (pun intended) your government ID, mister (or miss, I won’t judge).

This is a major shift. Across the globe, policymakers are coming up with the same idea: the internet is no longer a space where anonymity or pseudonymity is allowed by default. 

Chat, Are We Cooked?

For years, the internet treated your identity as optional. You could participate anonymously, or under a silly username that revealed nothing about your actual identity. Now, your access to the internet is seen as something that must be earned through verification and good behavior. No ID, no account. No biometric scan, no content. No compliance, no presence. 

And that’s where this stops being just a privacy issue and becomes a free speech problem. Because speech you’re not allowed to access, publish, or participate in without first identifying yourself isn’t truly free. If speaking online requires government-issued permission, then expression becomes conditional. And conditional speech has never been free in any meaningful sense.

What I find particularly horrifying is how this is happening. The World Wide Web used to connect people, and now, every governing body and social media platform feels free to come up with their own ways to police users. But when you take a step back and look at the bigger picture, only then do you notice a new version of the internet where your privacy is seen as a loophole to be closed in the name of someone’s safety, rather than everyone’s fundamental human right that should be fiercely protected.

The internet that promised freedom, anonymity, and choice to all is quietly being rewritten. In 2026, privacy is no longer a default right: it’s a reward for compliance. And free speech? It’s only free if you’re willing to identify yourself first. The moment anonymity becomes a loophole instead of a safeguard, expression itself becomes something that can be denied.