What if the price of logging onto the internet was your identity? The EU’s shiny new “age verification” app is being sold as child protection, but it looks a lot like the next phase of a decades-long experiment in mass surveillance; one that began with financial KYC and is now creeping into every corner of digital life. Europe isn’t just regulating the internet, but it's redesigning it into a permissioned system where anonymity becomes suspicious, dissent becomes risky, and freedom quietly expires behind a glowing age verification app.
Kudzai Kutukwa · Apr 17, 2026
