The EP paper appears to be highlighting the existence of a debate regarding VPN.
Relevant quote:
"Some argue that this is a loophole in the legislation that needs closing and call for age verification to be required for VPNs as well. In response, some VPN providers argue that they do not share information with third parties and state that their services are not intended for use by children in the first place. The Children's Commissioner for England has called for VPNs to be restricted to adult use only.
While privacy advocates argue that imposing age-verification requirements on VPNs would pose significant risk to anonymity and date protection, child-safety campaigners claim that their widespread use by minors requires a regulatory response. Pornhub and other large pornography platforms have reportedly lost web traffic following the enforcement of age-verification rules in the UK, while VPN apps have reached the top of download rankings."
Of course I'm not saying the EU won't regulate VPNs, but nowhere in this paper is "the EU" stating that VPNs need closing.
no, they want to pretend this is the issue, so that pervasive monitoring or permission and/or deanonymization is normalized. It is to serve the state apparatus, rather than any actual protection.
Maybe some want more control, but most certainly not everybody.
> so that pervasive monitoring
If you haven't gotten the memo, pervasive monitoring already exists. To sell ads.
> or permission and/or deanonymization is normalized
For age verification, it's possible to do it in a privacy-preserving manner. Now people spend their time complaining about the idea and claiming that all who disagree are extremists, so it doesn't help. But we could instead try to push for privacy-preserving age verification.
Last two times they tried to push other censorship/tracking laws (claiming as always "we have to, EU is making us") there were mass protests in every city and town.
In my own town of 5k people there were several hundred (500 people at least, probably more). And the previous govt backed down.
This topic seems to be coming back everytime certain countries (Denmark etc) hold the rotating EU presidency. Our current PM is certainly in the same EU clique that wants to push this so much, but it's an extremely unpopular position and he is already leading a weak minority coalition govt. It wouldn't take much to topple him, so he will not do anything like that (unless he is convicted people are distracted with some crisis, but that is where normal people come in. To keep watching what is being smuggled in).
I wonder why do voters in those countries that propose these laws tend to allow this to happen again and again.
To the EU regulators: we don't need another Stasi, we already have Google and Meta to worry about, thank you.
Also, to regulate in my native language is just a nice way to say the f word, if this conversation is about porn.
No matter what you (as population) say it will get implemented. If you don't, then they will put sanctions on Poland, withdraw financial partnerships, etc. Like with migrants, they are going to be sent there, even if Polish people vote against.
No matter if you are in favor or against, raising the topic will just make you socially be isolated or even legally punished in some places.
Sad for democracy and free speech.
EDIT: clarified about migrant policy and the decision of countries to choose or not
Kids don't have money and hardly ever manage to do crime without getting caught so they're profoundly uninteresting to surveil in this way, but adults are and here the interests of the state and corporations converge so they'll make a push for tyranny.
But how to make people accept it? Tell them they want to expose kids to gruesome tentacle porn, or else they'd support this. Few adults are willing to admit they even look at porn, let alone argue that this is an important activity that needs to be protected, which it is.
There is absolutely no need for new technology to track people, it's there already.
Also I feel like a big reason for age verification is social media. Many countries are trying to prevent kids from accessing social media (because we know it's bad for them), and age verification is the way to do that.
Badly implemented, age verification is bad. But there are ways to implement it in a privacy-preserving manner, which wouldn't make the current state of surveillance capitalism worse.
That, and the lack of real issues to solve.
The rise of authoritarianism? Inequality? Revival of geopolitical "realism"? Decrease in empathy and holistic thinking? Increasing willingness of the general population to engage in political adventurism? Accelerating resource consumption (and decelerating resource stocks).
And if you consider none of those "real" problems, I know some people seem to have forgotten about it, but what about climate change? Given the half-life of CO2 and methane, that's a problem as "real" as they get.
Did you grow up with free streaming platforms? Pretty sure many adolescents were accessing porn before those, though it was slightly less accessible.
I personally don't have a definitive opinion about porn (I feel like young kids obviously shouldn't have access to it, but it shouldn't be illegal to adults, but I don't know where the limit should be), but I feel like making it harder for kids to access social media makes sense.
You are right at pointing out that the paper is overall presenting the subject in a balanced manner, unfortunately it seems a bad choice was made when it came to that specific sentence, that gives a venue for it to be fed in the outrage machine.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/7826...
For this "story" to gain legs, someone must have pulled that sentence out of content without mentioning the source and then added some misleading context for the outrage.
In my view, it lends more authority to that statement over the other citations in that chapter.
I am inclined to take this as a honest editorial mistake: adding a ? at the end would have been the right choice.
I might be a bit lost on what you/we mean by context. For me, it’s the original pdf from the EU, no quotes.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/7826...
Bombing children is OK and we happily produce and deliver all the weapons needed for that.
Patterns of an ill society.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/7826...
Usually things like these are qualified like "the Department of Defense of the USA stated X".
> Of course I'm not saying the EU won't regulate VPNs
The word choice is quite revealing. You write "regulate VPNs". To me this is not "regulation" at all - it is restriction or factually forbidding it. It is newspeak language here if we dampen it via nicer-sounding words. It also distracts from the main question: why the sudden attack by EU lobbyists against VPNs?
Live sports, they’re already assaulting internet infrastructure in various EU member states (eg. La Liga forcing Spanish ISPs to block cloudflare IPs during matches). With this in mind it seems less a case of surveillance state and more a case of corporate state capture.
