My son’s Internet – Happily Imperfect

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My son’s Internet

My son turns 5 in October. He starts school in a couple of weeks. He has a tablet — Amazon Fire for Kids — and knows how to flick around the Photos app on my phone.

Yet I’m already thinking about what the internet will look like when he’s old enough to be online without me hovering nearby. Will it be a place he can explore, or a place locked away behind layers of verification and proof?

He is growing up with technology that, at times, still feels fantastically magical to me. I remember having only three TV channels, having to get up to push the button on the TV itself to change channel, and our home phone number being five digits long.

My internet is old

My Dad was interested in computers when they arrived in his school — he brought a BBC Microcomputer home to figure out what he could do with it. As an eight-year-old, it was an interesting thing to have in the house, but I was never that interested in what it could do as much as how it did it.

I veered away from Computer Studies at school when it was offered as I made my choices for my O Grades (I think it was the first year it had been offered), preferring the more hands-on fun of Physics.

And many years later along came the internet and the rest is history. We all know the dangers of social media, the trap of algorithms, and design driven by engagement metrics.

Researching the future

There are already studies in place that discuss the current impact of the internet and social media on teenagers and young adults, but fast-forwarding to the mid-2040s is almost impossible, yet the seeds are there and so with some extrapolation one can imagine a future internet that is more zoned, credentialed, and regulated.

It’s already started, with some governments banning social media, insisting on age verification checks, and from there it’s not a huge leap to a future that is much more heavily gated and supervised, possibly even divided into age-zoned spaces with their own sets of tiered controls and security, think specific spaces for adults, teens, school kids, employer driven content, and fully digitally verified places.

Of course this is still a lot of speculation but I think the stepping stones are already there.

So with all the extra checks and steps being put in place, it may mean the internet seems safer, but at what cost?

Which internet future?

I do not believe in astrology, yet I do somewhat identify with the traits of my star sign — Libra, represented by scales — as I tend to try and find a balance between most views and opinions. I tend to find that the truth lies in-between, in the grey spaces.

Pew’s 2025 teen survey shows that teenagers are aware of the dangers of the internet, and whilst many teens still value social media for friendship and creativity, growing numbers think it harms people their age, and girls especially report harms to sleep, confidence and mental health.

An optimistic version of the future suggests that, maybe, fewer children are thrown into adult content before they are ready. It could lead to less doomscrolling, less sleep loss, fewer addictive loops, and less social pressure engineered by companies that profit from attention. And maybe it forces the internet to admit that children are not just small adults with weaker passwords.

But there is a darker version too. Age checks can easily become identity checks. A child-safety layer can become a surveillance layer. The open, strange, anonymous internet could shrink into something more bureaucratic, where every doorway asks for credentials and only the biggest companies can afford to comply. Groups like the EFF warn that ID checks, biometrics and age estimation can create surveillance, censorship, data breaches and exclusion.

There is more to lose by gating the internet, changing how it will be used. I was a young adult when it arrived but still benefited from discovering new cultures and ideas, learnt about the importance of anonymity, and that’s before we delve into all the weird and wonderful specialist forums, and the ability to stumble into unexpected interests.

Jack is already curious about so many things, and I worry he could lose some of that ability to explore and find things for himself.

And of course, if we gate the internet heavily, teenagers, being teenagers, will still find ways around rules, perhaps into worse and less visible corners of the internet.

I’m also not alone in thinking that age-gating the internet is an admission of defeat.

"Age gates are such a procedural and mediocre response. Instead of reining in whatever broader risks may be invented or exacerbated by these companies’ products — and, in particular, the unique problems of each — we are throwing up our hands and pretending it is all too complicated."<br>Nick Heer – Pixel Envy

That’s the part that bothers me too. Age gates solve the problem administratively, without asking why so many online spaces became unsafe...