The UK just banned under-16s from X, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Facebook. Bluesky gets a pass. The platform where Labour politicians and legacy media journalists fled after Musk bought Twitter is conveniently exempt.

But the real story is not which platforms made the list. It is what enforcement requires. To ban children from social media, the government needs to know who is a child. That means age verification at scale. That means digital ID for everyone.

Google is already rolling out Digital IDs to UK Android phones tied to the Online Safety Act. Apple is adding age verification to iOS 26.4. This is not hypothetical. The infrastructure is being installed right now.

Age verification does not stay limited to children. It becomes the architecture for a permissions-based internet where you need government approval to speak. Every expansion of state control over speech in the last decade has been sold under the same banner. "Protect the children." Every time.

The alternative already exists. Nostr cannot be captured. Signal cannot be backdoored. Bitcoin cannot be frozen. Governments are telling you what they want. Build accordingly.