Up to nine EU countries have today given their support to the proposal tabled by Spain, France and Greece to protect minors from Internet risks, such as access to pornography. The initiative proposes concrete measures to create a safer and healthier digital environment for minors, addressing both technical and educational aspects.
In particular, it calls for all devices with Internet access available on the European market to be compulsorily equipped with age verification and parental control tools. It also proposes introducing a European digital age of majority, leaving it open for each Member State to set age, and recommends requiring age-appropriate network designs, minimizing addictive and persuasive architectures such as pop-ups, profile customization and automatic video playback.
“We have seen truly horrifying data on the consumption of pornography in boys and girls aged 12 and 13. Something has to be done. The most important thing is to implement age verification systems at European level. No pornographic platform is going to tell Europe what it has to do. As the Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral said, the future of children is always today. Tomorrow it will be late,” said the Minister for Digital Transformation and Public Service, Óscar López, who recalled the leadership of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, in this matter during his participation in the EU Council of Ministers of Telecommunications.
Spain, France and Greece have presented in this forum their joint proposal, to which Cyprus, Slovenia and Denmark have also joined as signatories, which will assume the next presidency of the EU Council and which will make the protection of minors on the Internet one of its priorities. In the course of the debate, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Slovakia and Croatia also supported the initiative.
European age verification pilot
The document presented by Spain, France and Greece reports on the development of Digital Wallet Beta as a robust, secure and privacy friendly age verification solution, fully aligned with eIDAS 2.
Spain is already participating with this application in the European pilot launched by the European Commission to provide an age verification tool that serves as a common basis for each country to adapt it to its national casuistry. In this way, it is intended to encourage all the tools to be interoperable with each other and to prevent each country from developing its own national solutions, which are less effective against the big platforms.
Age verification is one of the uses of the future European digital portfolio: the digital identity that all Member States will be required to provide to their citizens from November 2026, as laid down in the European eIDAS regulation. 2/
The European digital portfolio will allow European citizens to identify with the government and public and private companies, particularly when they require strong authentication (banks, energy companies, …) without having to give up their data, as is currently the case when they register with a user and password. With the European digital portfolio, it will be much easier to make arrangements with the administration or companies, but we will also gain sovereignty over our own data, since only the data necessary to access a service or a service will be shared.
