It was never meant to.
But it will be doing exactly what it was intended to do: surveil the citizens.

I've yet to see any "protect the kids" legislation that isn't either thinly veiled surveillance overreach or corporate collusion

Advertising to children sees more money returned on money spent in advertising. All these protect the children laws will assist advertising and companies who sell space to advertising the ability to make more money.

That is all that it is. The rest of the debate is just filler and weak justifications.

Privacy-intrusive age verification...for social media and video-sharing platforms.

I stand by my hypothesis that this merely a protect the children justification to de-anonymize the internet.

That way, when someone posts video of the situation on the ground in Gaza, the authorities know who it is, and can intervene.

Here in the states, there's all sorts of things the regime doesn't want to appear on video, from ICE brutality and officer-involved shootings, to the conditions in for-profit detention centers, to the conditions in neighborhoods near data centers.

I don't know what all videos might be uploaded in the EU, but it's not completely rosy and rainbows over there.

One of the most irritating aspects of the "EU Kids Act" is that a single, technically questionable measure is being treated as if it could solve a complex societal problem. Education and the development of digital literacy cannot be mandated by bureaucratic monstrosities detached from reality.

Just as in real life, children and young people need to learn to recognize risky situations, set boundaries, and seek help. Regulation should support them in this, but it cannot replace these skills.

Source: https://www.ccc.de/updates/2026/kids-act [translated from German via Google]

Of course, absolutely...

Even at USSR times, children were safer and much more educated, self-confident, self-sufficient, or even more free back then. They were capable to think with their own head, make choices, believe in their decisions. They were capable and mature.
They were disciplined and had a direction for a better life.

Now? Most of the children are dependent or even addicted, uneducated, have organization and health issues, and rarely decide themselves but rely on trends/hearsay/rumors, and have no idea what to do or where to go with their life, I believe, considering the most children I see nowadays.

That "Kids Act" is ridiculously awful, disgusting even... It is designed to manipulate on the future of us, people, starting from children, to control now children then mature, and make them dependent on the system from their dear infant development time when you absorb knowledge like a sponge.

That system is going to force children to be raised within that limited and carefully designed system so that raised people would continue to live how the system wants them to live, since they don't even know other options based their mind foundation on it. That system disregards your individual safety mechanisms, making your unique worldviews limited, controllable, and vulnerable for those who control it within that "act" system.

That is, a child that did not learn how to distinguish good from bad, learn how to protect themselves manually, will depend on that system or parents, but when parents die, the system will be their own "safety" they'll trust, and hence - controlled by it.

When a citizen's initiative presents a serious issue, gets a record number of signatures, and provides some good, easy to implement solutions - the European Comission says it'll do nothing, because it wants to focus on deregulation.

The same Comission is perfectly fine with implementing new, insanely vague and/or complicated laws that benefit literally nobody other than big tech companies, at the expense of everyone else.

And then the same Comission wonders why anti-EU sentiment is growing.

We're slowly but steadily getting to a point where the EU has all the dystopian surveillance and control measures in place as China does, except without any of the benefits that come with them.

They want the internet to be as cable, radio, and books before it. It just took longer because of the complexity of the systems. They can't stand that people for about 20 years had the means to educate themselves and they've been fighting to censor it since at least 2012. The problem is that now the tech bros are on board. Before they still had enough idealist types internally to keep them pushing back.

It was only a matter of time. having been raised in the free and open internet it really breaks my heart.

Coming soon, from the directors of ChatControl. WeDiddleKidsAct.

The purpose of a Law is what it does, not what its proponents loudly claim it's meant to do.

Child indoctrination has always been a thing. Now we are creating a tools for directed internet content and advertising.

No, I will not provide my ID online

who could have thought ?