Governments are ruining the internet to protect kids but there is a much better way

Photo by Jaycee300s (Pexels)

Over the last couple of years, we have seen governments in Australia, the UK, and beyond implementing stringent child-safety laws such as bans for under-16s on social media and complex age checks for people trying to access porn websites to prevent kids from getting access.

While all of these measures are well meaning, they are big risks to the open internet, quite dystopian in nature, and are generally too heavy-handed. They create a headache and security risk for adults who have to verify their age with sensitive documents and push children to unregulated corners of the internet and sketchy VPNs - or fake moustaches - just to bypass the restrictions.

The opposing view to all this age verification stuff is to say it’s the parents responsibility to protect their children; but let’s be real, many parents don’t possess the technical knowledge of how to block access to adult websites or monitor what their children are doing on their phones and computers.

In this editorial I will expound on what I think to be the best solution, namely, ISPs being required by law to ship routers to customers with a family DNS pre-configured. Candidate family DNS services that I am thinking of include Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.3 and CleanBrowsing’s Family Filter - this is not an exhaustive list, but two popular ones that exist. I believe that this solution would help to offer a baseline level of protection for families, remove the risk of too much data collection by governments, and leave adults free to adjust their DNS settings if they want unrestricted access to the internet.