France's Conseil constitutionnel has struck down President Emmanuel Macron's social media ban for under-15s, ruling it a "disproportionate" infringement on freedom of communication and an unjustified intrusion into private life, since verifying a child's age would first require every adult user to prove their own. This publication supports the ruling without reservation, and would like to explain why at more length than the news alone requires.
We made a version of this argument ourselves on 6 August, covering Austria's own age-verification law: a check run "once per device, then automatic" is not performed at the moment of access, but issued once as a standing, attributable credential and presented afterward to everything that asks for it, with nothing in the design confining it to the purpose it was built for. The Conseil reached the same conclusion, independently, eight days later. We mention this once and will not belabor it.
We would, however, like to draw the throughline the ruling leaves implicit. Austria's law reaches pornography sites by exactly the same mechanism it uses for social media -- a national identity credential, issued once per device, checked automatically thereafter, for anything that asks. France's court has just held that this architecture cannot be justified by appeal to child safety alone, because it necessarily captures every adult use of every service it touches. That holding does not mention pornography. It does not need to. An adult's right to access lawful adult content without identifying themselves to a national system is precisely the kind of privacy interest the Conseil found the ban could not override -- and France, a country with no shortage of its own history of treating that kind of liberty as a matter of principle rather than permission, is a fitting place for a court to have said so first.
There is also a better policy sitting in plain sight, which several MEPs made the case for at the European Parliament as long ago as 9 April: a coordinated EU digital-services tax on the platforms themselves, proposed for the next multiannual budget from 2028, aimed at exactly the companies whose design choices generate the underlying harm these bans are trying to legislate around. Conservative and social-democratic members alike have argued the platforms already "do very good business in Europe and generate considerable profits" and ought to contribute to the budget that makes that business possible. Taxing the mechanism does not require identifying every user of it. Banning access does. France's court has now said, in effect, that a state cannot have the second without building infrastructure it cannot justify. The first was always available.
Longtime readers will recall this publication's own milestone, reported in July, that its coverage had apparently begun turning up, independently and without attribution, in the reasoning of institutions in Berlin and Brussels. We are obliged to note, in the same spirit and with the same restraint, that Paris now appears to be reading us too.
Macron, for his part, wanted to be Europe's first mover on this question and is now Europe's first constitutional casualty of it; Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has been tasked with a revised bill, targeted for spring 2027, which is the traditional phrase governments use when the first draft did not survive contact with their own courts. France has a long tradition of leaders positioning themselves as heirs to a larger predecessor -- Victor Hugo wrote an entire pamphlet about it in 1852, "Napoleon le Petit," still in print. General de Gaulle, incidentally, was 196 centimeters tall. This publication does not apply either data point to anyone currently serving as President of the Republic. We merely note that both exist.
X. Voidwriter