My son turns 5 in October. He starts school in a couple of weeks. He has a tablet — Amazon Fire for Kids — and knows how to flick around the Photos app on my phone.
Yet I’m already thinking about what the internet will look like when he’s old enough to be online without me hovering nearby. Will it be a place he can explore, or a place locked away behind layers of verification and proof?
He is growing up with technology that, at times, still feels fantastically magical to me. I remember having only three TV channels, having to get up to push the button on the TV itself to change channel, and our home phone number being five digits long.
My internet is old
My Dad was interested in computers when they arrived in his school — he brought a BBC Microcomputer home to figure out what he could do with it. As an eight-year-old, it was an interesting thing to have in the house, but I was never that interested in what it could do as much as how it did it.
I veered away from Computer Studies at school when it was offered as I made my choices for my O Grades (I think it was the first year it had been offered), preferring the more hands-on fun of Physics.
And many years later along came the internet and the rest is history. We all know the dangers of social media, the trap of algorithms, and design driven by engagement metrics.
Researching the future
There are already studies in place that discuss the current impact of the internet and social media on teenagers and young adults, but fast-forwarding to the mid-2040s is almost impossible, yet the seeds are there and so with some extrapolation one can imagine a future internet that is more zoned, credentialed, and regulated.
It’s already started, with some governments banning social media, insisting on age verification checks, and from there it’s not a huge leap to a future that is much more heavily gated and supervised, possibly even divided into age-zoned spaces with their own sets of tiered controls and security, think specific spaces for adults, teens, school kids, employer driven content, and fully digitally verified places.
Of course this is still a lot of speculation but I think the stepping stones are already there.
So with all the extra checks and steps being put in place, it may mean the internet seems safer, but at what cost?
Which internet future?
I do not believe in astrology, yet I do somewhat identify with the traits of my star sign — Libra, represented by scales — as I tend to try and find a balance between most views and opinions. I tend to find that the truth lies in-between, in the grey spaces.
Pew’s 2025 teen survey shows that teenagers are aware of the dangers of the internet, and whilst many teens still value social media for friendship and creativity, growing numbers think it harms people their age, and girls especially report harms to sleep, confidence and mental health.
An optimistic version of the future suggests that, maybe, fewer children are thrown into adult content before they are ready. It could lead to less doomscrolling, less sleep loss, fewer addictive loops, and less social pressure engineered by companies that profit from attention. And maybe it forces the internet to admit that children are not just small adults with weaker passwords.
But there is a darker version too. Age checks can easily become identity checks. A child-safety layer can become a surveillance layer. The open, strange, anonymous internet could shrink into something more bureaucratic, where every doorway asks for credentials and only the biggest companies can afford to comply. Groups like the EFF warn that ID checks, biometrics and age estimation can create surveillance, censorship, data breaches and exclusion.
There is more to lose by gating the internet, changing how it will be used. I was a young adult when it arrived but still benefited from discovering new cultures and ideas, learnt about the importance of anonymity, and that’s before we delve into all the weird and wonderful specialist forums, and the ability to stumble into unexpected interests.
Jack is already curious about so many things, and I worry he could lose some of that ability to explore and find things for himself.
And of course, if we gate the internet heavily, teenagers, being teenagers, will still find ways around rules, perhaps into worse and less visible corners of the internet.
I’m also not alone in thinking that age-gating the internet is an admission of defeat.
“Age gates are such a procedural and mediocre response. Instead of reining in whatever broader risks may be invented or exacerbated by these companies’ products — and, in particular, the unique problems of each — we are throwing up our hands and pretending it is all too complicated.”
Nick Heer – Pixel Envy
That’s the part that bothers me too. Age gates solve the problem administratively, without asking why so many online spaces became unsafe for children in the first place. Where’s the push-back?
I’m not sure which one will play out, but looking back on the rise of social media, it’s entirely possible that both scenarios will exist. There won’t be one future. There will be several versions of it, depending on where you sit and which parts of the internet you use.
You’ll either buy into the fully governed internet — although we can already see partly how that works by looking to the people who think Facebook IS the internet — or you’ll push back against all the IDs, and checks, and demand your right to use the internet as you wish, and ask the companies and governments to figure out how to better manage how children and teenagers access and use the internet.
We must also consider the impact of all these safety measures being thrown up and look at who controls them. There are legal battles going on between governments and the large tech industry giants. Will Google be responsible for this, will Meta? Apple? Will it be pushed to a government department to enforce? Will they push it down the ladder to the schools? And what of the growing age-verification industry who stand to gain handsomely from the apparent need for their services?
Where do you want your information, and your children’s information, to be held?
The future of work
I also wonder what work will look like for Jack. Whatever he does, especially if he becomes a knowledge worker, his working life will almost certainly be online and wrapped in proofs: proof of identity, proof of qualifications, proof that a piece of work is his and not generated by AI.
Those realities are already here and growing in number. I already have proof of identity available, and the need to prove my work is mine, and not created from scratch by AI, is already in place. I do wonder why we aren’t asking the AI companies to solve that, although it is clearly in their interest to avoid such work. The more usage, the better.
Who knows?
I think it’s already safe to say that, to varying degrees, the future internet for children will probably be less open by default, more protective by design, and more dependent on verification infrastructure and processes.
I’m not sure that’s the right direction — as I alluded to earlier, kids will find a way around these things, which will then mean even more restrictive measures put in place to counter that, and that is a vicious spiral.
I guess it’s down to the extent of those controls, how far they go; will they remain a humane child-safety layer, or blossom into a general-purpose identity checkpoint for the whole web behind which governments can build even more control and surveillance of their citizens.
I take some solace that, even though he’s only four years old, Jack already seems sensible, takes his time to think through things.
I can’t know which internet Jack will inherit. I suspect it will be safer in some ways and smaller in others. More protective, but less open. More accountable, but more watched.
So perhaps my job is not to predict it perfectly, or even to protect him from all of it. It is to help him become the kind of person who can move through it with judgement.
What are your thoughts?