This week Keir Starmer announced the UK will ban under-16s from TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and X — by law, from spring 2027. Australia did the same in December. France is close. US states are moving one by one.

The intentions are good. The mechanism is the problem.

A ban only works if platforms know how old you are. And the only way to know your age is to know who you are. Starmer's government confirmed it plainly: over-16s "may have to verify their ages." Credit cards. Email history. Government ID. The anonymous internet doesn't survive that architecture.

This isn't a slippery slope argument — it's an engineering one. You cannot build an age gate without an identity layer. Once that layer exists, it will be used for other things, by other governments, with other justifications.

China has the Great Firewall. Russia has RuNet. We used to call that the splinternet — the open web fragmented along national lines. Now democracies are building the same infrastructure, piece by piece, with the best of intentions.

SPLINTERNET exists in the gap. No accounts. No logs. No identity. A link, a conversation, gone.