Dame Rachel told BBC Newsnight: “Of course, we need age verification on VPNs - it’s absolutely a loophole that needs closing and that’s one of my major recommendations.”

She wants ministers to explore requiring VPNs “to implement highly effective age assurances to stop underage users from accessing pornography.”

Stop trying to enforce this at the service level, for God’s sake. What are you going to do when people switch to stuff like Tor?* ‘Online safety regulation pushes kids to that dark web’ will be a fire headline in a couple of months/years.

* I remember seeing someone link to something here they described as ‘Tor for apps’ that I can’t find, does anyone have that at hand?

The report also found more children are stumbling across pornography accidentally, with some of the 16 to 21-year-olds surveyed saying they had viewed it “aged six or younger”.

I’m sorry, but this is genuinely a failure of parents. Like, I’m not normally one to trot out the ‘parents should helicopter their children’ defence against regulation of social media, but giving a bloody six year old not-monitored-enough access to the internet is on the parent.

Also, I’d take this all a lot more seriously if parent actually used the tools already available to them:

We actually already have measures to deal with this: back in 2011 the government worked with ISPs (internet service providers) to come up with a Code of Practice on implementing ‘parental controls’ for all new customers. In 2013 this was adopted by all the major players. So when you (an adult – because you have to be over 18 to do this) register for an internet connection, you are offered adult content filtering by default. You can tweak this, if you like, for example you can decide you’re happy for your family to access social media sites but not pornography. Or if you don’t anticipate any children using your connection, you can opt out of adult filters altogether. Research conducted in 2022, however, found that although 61% of parents were aware of these filters, only 27% actually used them. Again, sing it with me: lol.

Back to the BBC article.

More than half of respondents to the survey had viewed strangulation as children, prompting Dame Rachel to also ask the government to ban depictions of it.

This is an implicit admission that age verification is ineffective. If it was, then children wouldn’t see it and then we wouldn’t need to ban it.