EU Commission Unveils Kids Act to Ban Social Media for Under-13s and Restrict 13-15s

Brussels is replaying a pattern seen with the 1998 U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the 2003 EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive—early child-focused media rules that eventually became global defaults. Today’s proposal sits at the confluence of two long arcs: the EU’s decades-long push to assert ‘digital sovereignty’ (GDPR 2018, DMA/DSA 2022) and society’s 150-year project of progressively shielding minors (from 1833 UK Factory Act to 20th-century labor laws). By shifting the burden of proof onto Big Tech and normalising cryptographic age checks, the Kids Act could entrench a permission-based internet architecture for the next century. If it sticks, Brussels—not Silicon Valley—will define childhood’s digital perimeter worldwide; if it fails, it will join earlier utopian efforts that crumbled against enforcement and civil-liberty headwinds. Either way, the debate signals that in the long sweep of history the question is no longer whether states will police algorithmic environments but how deeply into the technical stack that policing will reach.