One policy, six European variants, and Brussels can veto any of them.
This page is a worked sample, not a subscriber brief: it exists to show the format at full length. Every claim below is sourced to public reporting or an official statement, linked in full in the Sourced section, and dated to what was actually true as of 22 July 2026, not to what a tidy narrative would prefer. Where a bill has passed one chamber but not another, or where Brussels has intervened, that is stated plainly rather than smoothed into “in force.”
Australia moved first and is the only jurisdiction here with a ban actually in force. Enforcement has been real, not nominal: platforms removed millions of under-16 accounts within weeks, and the regulator has since opened formal investigations into five of the largest platforms for suspected non-compliance, alongside a push to raise penalties.
France looked set to be next, and is the case that most changes the shape of this story. Both chambers of its parliament passed a ban, but two different versions of one, with disagreements over mechanism serious enough that a joint committee is needed to reconcile them. Then, two days before this brief was written, the European Commission ruled the French approach incompatible with the EU’s Digital Services Act. That is the first time Brussels has directly blocked a national attempt to legislate this policy, and it means the September 2026 start date now widely reported earlier this year is no longer reliable. France 24 has since reported that lawmakers reached a compromise on the bill’s text on 20 July 2026, with a vote expected around 21 July, though that account is not yet corroborated by a second outlet.
Behind France, five more countries are moving at different speeds and toward different thresholds: Spain and Portugal are in committee, Denmark has a coalition agreement but no bill text yet, Greece has an announced date without final legislation, and Germany’s governing coalition has not even agreed internally on whether the age should be 14 or 16. None of these is a settled law. At the EU level, the only concrete infrastructure is a non-binding parliamentary resolution and an age-verification app that the Commission calls technically ready but that is still in pilot in seven member states.
The question this raises for anyone operating across these markets is not whether the policy spreads. It already has. It is which national model survives contact with EU law first, and what a compliance map with six different ages and no common enforcement mechanism costs to operate against.