Jennifer Huddleston and David Inserra
No one disputes that parenting in the digital age comes with new challenges, particularly as our education, entertainment, and work environments have increasingly migrated online. This has led many advocates to call for policy interventions in the name of protecting young people online, claiming that it would benefit young people’s mental health or address other societal concerns about kids these days. But even if that is the case for a particular young person, as Thomas Sowell wrote, “There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.”
In our new paper, “Online Age Verification Has Guaranteed Costs and Uncertain Benefits,” we point out six key costs or harms that should be considered when calculating such policy tradeoffs. Those costs are:
False positives for adults and disparate impact on minority groups;
Compliance and opportunity costs;
Data breaches and privacy risks;
Restricted access to lawful information for users;
Loss of anonymous and pseudonymous speech;
Weakened role of parents.
As we note, early evidence from places with stringent regulation, such as Australia and the United Kingdom, indicates that the purported benefits are, at best, uncertain and that restrictive policy-based approaches are typically ineffective. While there may be benefits for a particular individual, family, or child, age-verification policies will bring much broader negative consequences for users of all ages and for innovation more generally.
You can read the full paper on Cato’s website.
