The 'Think of the Children' Playbook Is Getting Old

There’s a piece going around arguing that governments are breaking the internet in the name of child safety, and that forcing ISPs to ship routers with default family DNS filters would be a far cleaner solution. It’s a reasonable technical argument. The problem is it’s solving for the stated goal, and a lot of people are skeptical that the stated goal is the actual goal.

That scepticism is fair. When a government says “we need age verification on adult websites,” they are also describing a system that requires you to hand over identifying documents to visit legal content. The data gets collected. The data gets stored. The data gets breached, or sold, or handed to another agency under a different justification eighteen months later. We’ve seen this pattern enough times that treating the stated intention as the real one requires a certain generosity of spirit that the evidence doesn’t support.

The DNS filter idea is genuinely elegant by comparison. If you require ISPs to ship routers with content filtering on by default, no age verification needed, no identity documents, no centralised database of who visited what, you get a meaningful layer of friction between a curious ten-year-old and the worst of the internet. An adult who wants to disable it can do so. It’s not perfect. VPNs exist. Kids figure things out. But it targets the actual problem without building surveillance infrastructure as a side effect.

The counter-argument I keep turning over is the one about compliant majorities. Strict rules tend to affect the people who follow rules. The sites that actually don’t give a damn about user welfare will find workarounds. The legitimate platforms will comply and collect more data in the process. This has played out with every other attempt to regulate the internet through identity requirements.

My daughter is fifteen. I’ve had conversations with her about what’s online, what’s real, what’s manipulative, what’s just genuinely awful. Those conversations matter more than any DNS filter. But I’m also aware that not every parent has the time or the context to have them, and “parents should just parent better” is a response that conveniently ignores the fact that a lot of families are stretched well past their limit. Two jobs, no margin, a tablet as the only available babysitter. That’s real. It’s not ideal. It’s just real.

The honest position is probably this: some people in government genuinely want to protect kids online and are reaching for blunt instruments because the nuanced ones are hard. Some people in government want the surveillance infrastructure and are using child safety as the cover story. Both things are true simultaneously and they’re hard to separate from the outside.

What I’d push back on is the idea that any of the current proposals are actually optimised for child welfare. If they were, we’d be talking about platform accountability, algorithmic design, default settings on devices, and better digital literacy in schools. Instead we’re talking about uploading your driver’s licence to watch legal content. Those are different problems, and solving the second one does essentially nothing about the first.

The DNS filter proposal at least has the shape of a solution that matches the stated problem. Whether anyone in a position to implement it is actually interested in solving that problem is a separate question, and I don’t have a clean answer for it.