Zuckerberg’s “Fix” for Child Safety Could End Anonymous Internet Access for Everyone
Mark Zuckerberg spent more than five hours on the stand in Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday, testifying before a jury for the first time about claims that Meta deliberately designed Instagram to addict children.
The headline from most coverage was the spectacle: an annotated paper trail of internal emails, a 35-foot collage of the plaintiff’s Instagram posts unspooled across the courtroom, a CEO growing visibly agitated under cross-examination.
The more important story is what Wednesday’s proceedings are being used to build.
The trial is framed as a child safety case. What it is actually doing, especially through Zuckerberg’s own testimony, is laying the political and legal groundwork for mandatory identity verification across the internet.
And Zuckerberg, rather than pushing back on that outcome, offered the court his preferred implementation plan.
Zuckerberg was pressed with internal documents, including a 2015 estimate that 4 million users under 13 were on Instagram, roughly 30 percent of all American children aged 10 to 12. An old email from former public policy head Nick Clegg was read into the record: “The fact that we say we don’t allow under-13s on our platform, yet have no way of enforcing it, is just indefensible.” Zuckerberg acknowledged the slow progress: “I always wish that we could have gotten there sooner.”
He also told the jury: “I don’t see why this is so complicated,” when pressed on the company’s age verification policies. His proposed answer to that question is the core problem.
Multiple times during his testimony, Zuckerberg argued that age verification should be handled not by individual apps but at the operating system level, by Apple and Google. He told jurors that operating system providers “were better positioned to implement age verification tools, since they control the software that runs most smartphones.”
“Doing it at the level of the phone is just a lot cleaner than having every single app out there have to do this separately,” he said. He added that it “would be pretty easy for them” to implement.
Note that. Zuckerberg is not proposing that Instagram verify the ages of Instagram users. He is proposing that Apple and Google verify the identity of every smartphone user, for every app, at the OS level.
Once that infrastructure exists, it does not stay limited to social media. It applies to every app on the phone. Every website accessed through that phone’s browser. Every communication sent through any app on the device.
This is more than age verification. It is a national digital ID layer baked into the two operating systems that run the overwhelming majority of the world’s smartphones.
The proposal also solves Zuckerberg’s immediate legal problem. If Apple and Google own age enforcement, platforms like Meta are no longer responsible for enforcing it. The liability shifts. The company under lawsuit in Los Angeles deflects the core allegation by pointing at Cupertino and Mountain View.
Who decides which apps require ID verification once this infrastructure exists? Apple and Google do. They would be deputized as identity gatekeepers for the internet. Two private companies, already under serious antitrust scrutiny for their control of app distribution, handed new authority over who accesses what online and under what identity.
Zuckerberg’s OS-level verification proposal fits neatly into a legislative agenda that was moving before he took the stand Wednesday.
The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), pending at the federal level, would direct agencies to develop age verification at the device or operating system level, the same framework Zuckerberg promoted from the stand.
