Opinion Australia’s social media crackdown: Internet’s free-range era is over — and we still don’t know who should be in charge
Clash between genuine concerns of user safety and the fear of expanding state control will define the next phase of the internet. It is happening at a time when the border between online life and the physical world has faded, and the internet has become its own republic where all of us already live as primary green card holders
The internet was never built as a centralised system. Its original structure was meant to survive disruptions and move around blocks. This makes banning anything online a messy affair. 
By Anurag Minus Verma
For a long time, the internet was treated like a giant playground with no fences. Children wandered through it with the same freedom as adults. Platforms grew on the belief that attention is neutral and clicks are harmless. Governments did not intervene because they treated the internet as a harmless side room of modern life, a separate place where nothing real ever happened.
That era is closing. Australia adding Twitch to the under-16 ban is not a routine policy update. It is an admission that a long held fantasy has collapsed. Online life is the real world. In current times, it shapes a young mind with more force than any family, classroom, or neighbourhood that claims to raise a child.
The early cracks in the free-range internet showed up years ago. China tried curfews and identity checks for minors. Europe wrote long laws about data and consent. France demanded that parents approve social media accounts for under-15 children. Brazil pushed for age verification. These were small attempts to discipline a universe that had grown like a wild plant. The simple reason behind this change is a realisation that platforms are built to chase attention, and care exists only in their symbolic speeches of founders.
If you look at the early internet, Omegle is the clearest reminder of how freedom without guardrails collapses. It began as a place for casual chats with strangers. The absence of checks slowly turned it into an unsafe corner of the web, with investigations by The BBC and reports in The New York Times showing how adults repeatedly used it to expose minors to explicit behaviour. The site shut down because it could not protect young users. It was one of the first signs that unregulated digital spaces rarely stay playful and can often drift into darker territory.
What is happening with Twitch sits inside a longer cultural pattern. When something appears risky for teenagers, states step in. It is the same logic behind alcohol rules in many Indian cities, where the legal drinking age is 21 or higher, yet college bars still fill with 19-year-olds sharing shisha and sinking into the familiar trance of youthful rebellion. Restrictions do not stop behaviour completely. On the internet, this pattern is even stronger, and the same will likely happen with Twitch. Teenagers will use VPNs, shortcuts, and fake ages.
The internet was never built as a centralised system. Its original structure was meant to survive disruptions and move around blocks. This makes banning anything online a messy affair. At the same time, these platforms are no longer simple entertainment outlets. A large creator economy sits on top of them, with young people earning through streams, ads and small communities they build over years.
Founders of early internet platforms also behaved with the same philosophy. When governments asked them to remove harmful content or block certain activity, they responded with a mix of reluctance and idealism. Some claimed that the internet should remain open. Others said they had no way to control user behaviour. The culture of the early web was shaped by the idea that everything online should run without rules.
In the current era, internet freedom activists warn that safety-based regulations often become the doorway to state control. They argue that once governments gain the power to block or filter online spaces, the authority rarely stays limited to child protection. The same tools can expand to political speech, journalism, and satire. In Turkey, child safety rules were later used to push platforms to remove political posts. In Brazil similar powers were used during elections to restrict critical content. India has already seen several moves in this direction. It is not a fear without basis that measures introduced in the name of safety can slowly shape what people are allowed to say or criticise, especially in democracies where free speech is already fragile.
The clash between genuine concerns of user safety and the fear of expanding state control will define the next phase of the internet. It is happening at a time when the border between online life and the physical world has faded, and the internet has become its own republic where all of us already live as primary green card holders. In this situation, it becomes difficult to decide what should be banned and who should hold that power. The digital world is growing faster than any rulebook written for it, and there is no real precedent for how to govern a space this vast. Handling it will be tricky because power over the digital world rarely stays technical, it quickly becomes a set of loopholes that help capture more power.
The writer is an author, podcaster and multimedia artist
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