Age Verification Is A Windfall for Big Tech—And A Death Sentence For Smaller Platforms www.eff.org/deeplinks…

Lawmakers often sell age-verification mandates as a silver bullet for Big Tech’s harms, but in practice, these laws do nothing to rein in the tech giants. Instead, they end up crushing smaller platforms that can’t absorb the exorbitant costs.

We’ve already seen how this plays out in the UK. When the Online Safety Act came into force recently, platforms like Reddit, YouTube, and Spotify implemented broad (and extremely clunky) age verification measures while smaller sites, including forums on parenting, green living, and gaming on Linux, were forced to shutter. Take, for example, the Hamster Forum, “home of all things hamstery,” which announced in March 2025 that the OSA would force it to shut down its community message boards. Instead, users were directed to migrate over to Instagram […]