Australia’s search engines are about to have age restrictions similar to the ones in effect for Porn Hub in the UK. Starting at the end of 2025, Australians will have to verify their ages when surfing the web while logged into their Google or Microsoft accounts and using each company’s respective search engines.
The new rules come as part of a new set of regulations put into effect earlier this week. According to the regulations, search engines will be required to verify the age of their account holders before allowing them to use search engines. Since Google and Microsoft are the two biggest search engines in the country, those are the two companies who are under the biggest fire to make this happen.
Per the rules, search engines with account holders must “implement appropriate age assurance measures for account holders” and “apply tools and/or settings like ‘safe search’ functionality, at the highest safety setting by default for an account holder its age assurance systems indicate is likely to be an Australian child.”
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The purpose of the legislation is to prevent children from running into pornographic content and “high-impact violence material” via search engines. Per the regulations, when the search engine is engaged in ‘safe search’ mode, such content must be filtered out entirely. In instances where age assurance cannot be done (like if the user isn’t logged in), such images and materials must be blurred.
According to the Australian Computer Society, the measures are similar to what’s being considered for the country’s under-16 social media ban. The legislation, which was passed in Nov. 2024, has a 12-month clock when it goes into effect. That means the age assurance rules for search engines and the under-16 social media ban will happen within a month or two of each other.
Whether or not age assurance laws like this will be effective is a matter of debate. Digital privacy experts and free speech advocates agree that children should not have access to materials intended for people of legal age. However, there’s growing concern that age verification laws don’t work. VPNs allow people to surf from other locations, bypassing location-specific rules while some porn sites aren’t based in the U.S. and therefore may simply choose not to follow the rules.