No Child Left Online

Mike, there's a lot of news this week as ever.

We have a mix of kind of regulatory news and some kind of AI news.

We've been covering more of the latter, I'd say, in the last couple of weeks because of just the nature of the news agenda.

We're going to tackle a lot of that in our Patreon episode.

But we're going to start, I think, with the much touted, much teased EU social media ban approach, which we've touched on on the podcast before.

We've kind of got a sense of what's coming because there was this special panel that the EU Commission convened and which wrote a report.

It came out in July and advocated for a tiered approach for teenagers that graduated them through access to social media and different features as they got older.

And the big announcement this week, or rather lack of one, is the fact that they have gone with that approach.

The headline is that we're seeing under-13s not be allowed any social media access unless they're with a parent or unless it's a kid-safe app like YouTube Kids, that 13 to 15-year-olds will be allowed additional access and that they'll have what they call a limited account to be able to graduate through as they learn the internet more.

And then the over-15s is where you get certainly more access to the internet.

And we'll talk a bit more about what that looks like.

This was all announced, Mike, in a big, flashy kind of State of the Union address by Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president.

And it's almost like not a story because it's been so talked about, but it still merits discussion, I think, in the podcast today.

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a step forward in terms of actually making this a reality.

And so it is a big story, I think, especially because it will, assuming it goes into effect, it will impact much of Europe.

You know, we've talked about France pushing their own social media ban for teens.

And like a day before this announcement came out, Macron announced that they were, you know, where they had revamped the plan that had been thrown out by the constitutional review.

And this would effectively wipe that out.

There's a little bit of, you know, it's kind of funny to see him rushing to get this thing done and it's not going to matter.

But yeah, I mean, this would obviously impact a huge number of people.

And so I think it is a big story and we'll see.

And, and, You know, the thing that struck me about it is that I think there are problems with it.

I think that it requires age assurance, as they say, which is age verification, which in the end becomes identity verification.

And as I've raised over and over again, there are really big privacy concerns with that, especially when it's mandated.

You're going to have bad implementations.