Ofcom counts the age checks — 69 million of them — and finds the harm largely intact
Ofcom's first statutory Use of Age Assurance Report finds that in the first six months of the Online Safety Act's child-protection duties (July–December 2025), 69 million age checks were completed across the 32 services examined — a 23-fold increase — with facial age estimation and photo-ID matching the dominant methods. The judgment is mixed: checks deterred access on pornography sites that implemented them, but Ofcom says it has "not seen a material reduction in the volume of harmful content being surfaced to children" and that age assurance "is not delivering the intended outcome." No single method eliminates circumvention; the regulator calls for layered protections.
Why we logged it. A regulator putting a number on a compulsory friction imposed at national scale, then honestly assessing whether the extraction it was meant to interrupt actually fell — the discipline attention markets have never been subjected to. Caveat: this is child-safety regulation, not attention-market regulation; the relevance is by analogy of method, not subject.