Are we replacing open access with an AI-gated internet?
There is a quiet, tectonic shift happening in how we move through the internet, and it isn’t coming from Big Tech product updates—it’s coming from government policy.
Our news cycles are consumed by class action suits against Big Tech and country wide youth social media bans eg: Australia’s enforcement model to New Zealand’s recent legislative moves. Government regulators are focused on screen time and child safety which is great, but they are also quietly rewriting the rules of digital access for everyone in the process.
To enforce age bans, governments are mandating age verification—so Big Tech is turning directly to their AI capabilities as the answer. In practice, this means deploying AI-driven facial age estimation and automated identity verification as the default passport for internet entry, for everyone.
As I see it, the issue isn't just that these systems fail marginalised communities—the deeper policy issue is the paradigm shift itself: we are replacing open access with an AI-gated, identity-credentialed internet.
And I haven’t even touched on the privacy and data ownership concerns this approach raises.
The "Show Your Papers" Internet in the AI Era
Warning. I am about to rant.
We are moving away from the open public square the internet was invented to be, toward an environment where showing your papers—or subjecting your face to an algorithm—is the prerequisite for basic participation.
To read, communicate, or access resources, citizens are expected to upload their passports or undergo real-time biometric scanning to proprietary AI models. This creates a coercive trade-off: surrender your most sensitive facial data and identity markers to private platforms and AI vendors, or accept digital disenfranchisement.
Worse still, in a world dominated by data-hungry AI platforms, forced identity verification provides tech companies with the ultimate prize: high-fidelity, verified human data to train and fine-tune their models.
When identity verification becomes the price of admission, privacy effectively becomes a luxury good. Those who can afford to navigate these systems—or absorb the risk of data exposure—retain access. Those who cannot, or who reasonably fear state surveillance and algorithmic bias, are pushed further to the margins.
Rant over.
Redefining the Equity Discussion
These blogs I’m writing are not an attack on AI. GenAI is revolutionising our lives, for me it’s an amazing assistant - I have asked it to sanity check this blog post, use it to correct my spelling and help me work through complex data challenges - with every privacy flag ticked and staying in my walled garden of course.
However, it’s also reframing digital equity and changing the perimeter.
Digital equity today is fundamentally about the terms of entry. If accessing the digital world requires surrendering biometric privacy to automated algorithmic gatekeepers, access is no longer equitable—it is conditional.
When influencing policy on safety, I think we all need to challenge the assumption that AI-driven age verification is a neutral solution. Outsourcing digital rights to facial estimation models doesn't make the internet safer; it builds higher walls at the gate. True digital equity requires public infrastructure that is safe and open by design, where no citizen has to trade their fundamental right to privacy just to cross the threshold.
This might be the one rare occasion my views are aligned with the Act party, now that’s food for thought. Ngā manaakitanga, Vic
