Online safety - regulators faces impossible choices between privacy, competition, and child protection

My previous two reports on online safety looked at the challenge of, first, creating a legislative white elephant in a jungle of unpredictable problems and, second, the difficulties that arise when policymakers see online safety differently to the very people they seek to protect, namely children and vulnerable young people.

But these are far from the only issues in this tricky legislative space. Another challenge in online safety is how to verify someone's age when they access adult, sensitive, or 'legal but harmful' content, but without identifying them personally. This aspect of policy will be fiercely debated now that a national ID scheme is on the cards, and UK age verification dialogs already ask users to upload passports or photo IDs.

Critics of a mandatory, government-issued identity scheme argue that it is a small step from there to a culture of national surveillance and assumed mistrust. But there ...