ATLANTA, Ga. – Earlier this week, the Brady Mills Agency, an Atlanta-based technology firm, announced the launch of AgeWallet, which the company proclaimed a “groundbreaking plug-and-play age assurance solution that allows online merchants and consumers to meet rapidly expanding age verification requirements with a single, secure platform.”

Referencing the Supreme Court’s decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, Brady Mills said the decision “accelerated the need for privacy-first verification tools that can scale globally, across industries including adult entertainment, gaming, cannabis, and alcohol.”

“Our team of lawyers, developers and strategists have been working around the clock to bring AgeWallet to market,” said Brady Mills, the Founder and CEO of Brady Mills Agency. “Our age assurance solution is specifically designed for small to mid-size merchants in the high-risk, adult space who simply can’t afford to spend thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars to remain compliant with ever-changing age verification regulations around the world.”

I’ll leave it to others to decide how “groundbreaking” Brady Mills’ age-verification system is, but one thing I know for certain is that it won’t be the only new age-verification system we’ll see launched in the weeks and months ahead.

There’s another element of the announcement that I think we’ll see echoed repeatedly, not only by other age-verification solutions, but soon enough by governments and legislatures around the world: A means of defeating the practice of using Virtual Private Networks to circumvent age verification barriers.

According to the announcement, AgeWallet “employs advanced location and network integrity checks to detect and prevent circumvention through VPNs, proxies, and other forms of masking technology—ensuring that verification requests originate from legitimate geographic locations.”

“When suspicious activity is detected, AgeWallet automatically requires full re-verification before granting access,” the announcement adds. “This added layer of enforcement helps merchants maintain compliance even as regulators in regions such as the U.K. move to restrict VPN-based access to age-restricted content.”

Wow, that is indeed great news! Well, it’s great news unless you happen reside in a jurisdiction that prohibits its citizens from accessing certain forms of expression entirely, as this sort of technology will enable the lovely monarchs, dictators and autocrats who rule over you to more effectively restrict your access to anything they deem objectionable.

To be fair, merchants do have to comply with the law and it sounds like, if it functions as described in the release announcement, AgeWallet can help them do so. But as someone who has been using the Internet since before it was even called the fucking Internet, I’m going to miss the days of a truly open, truly liberated and – yes – truly unregulated global internet.

What has replaced that once open internet probably isn’t much ‘safer,’ but sure it is a lot harder to navigate. Congratulations, global governments and the contractors who will make money serving them, I guess?

Image by Sharath G. from Pexels