The European Commission will publish the Kids Act on Thursday. The draft sets two clear age tiers that shift the burden of compliance onto platforms and parents rather than leaving access decisions to children themselves.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen laid out the core rule in a speech on Wednesday. She stated that no social media would be permitted under the age of 13 and no personal account would be allowed under the age of 15. The same restrictions cover some gaming platforms and AI chatbots. The Financial Times obtained an early copy of the proposal and confirmed the two-tier structure that now forms the backbone of the legislation.
Under the first tier, children younger than 13 may reach any covered service only when a parent is actively supervising the session. Platforms must therefore design sessions that cannot start or continue without verified adult presence. The second tier covers ages 13 to 15. These users may open accounts, but only after a parent gives explicit consent. Once opened, the accounts must include built-in parental controls and enforceable time limits. Social media companies, online gaming services, and providers of AI chatbots all fall under the same obligations. The text makes no distinction between consumer chatbots and those embedded in other apps; any system that allows open-ended conversation with a minor is covered.
The Wired account of the proposal highlights three practical obstacles that companies will face during rollout. Age-verification systems must distinguish between the under-13, 13-to-15, and over-15 groups without collecting more data than necessary. Ongoing parental oversight requires interfaces that let adults review activity and revoke access without breaking the service for the rest of the household. Privacy risks arise because any verification method that stores identity documents or biometric signals creates new targets for data breaches. The draft does not prescribe a single technical solution, leaving each company to choose its own method while remaining liable for failures.
Von der Leyen framed the measure as a reassertion of public authority. She said, “Europe has the power to act. It is us who decide the rules, not big tech.” That statement directly addresses the prior state in which most platforms set their own minimum ages and enforced them lightly through self-reported birth dates.
The rules place enforcement costs and design changes on the platforms rather than on families alone. Companies must now decide whether to build verified parental tools or limit features for younger users entirely. If the measures hold, they reduce the default reach of recommendation algorithms and chatbot conversations among the youngest cohort. The outcome will show whether regulators or the platforms set the practical defaults for child access. Smaller services may simply block users under 16 rather than invest in the required controls, while larger platforms will absorb the engineering expense and pass some of it to advertisers through higher per-user costs. Parents gain formal levers they previously lacked, yet they also inherit daily responsibility for approving accounts and monitoring time limits. The legislation therefore does not remove children from digital spaces; it inserts an adult checkpoint at every entry point and keeps that checkpoint visible to regulators.
---
Sources:
{"word_count": 612, "sources_used": 2}
No comments yet