[POLICY BRIEF] Life in coauthor ship, by Sergio Branco
24 April 2025
Towards Harmonised Online Age Verification? A Comparative Study of French and EU Legal Frameworks
The increasing exposure of minors to digital risks presents a significant challenge for legislators worldwide. The French and European legal frameworks that this study seeks to compare offer a particularly rich field for analysis in this context. Both frameworks address various “age verification scenarios.” In the French legal system, such scenarios primarily concern access to alcoholic beverages, tobacco and vaping products, online betting platforms, and social media services under the “digital majority” law (2023), as well as access to pornographic content pursuant to the SREN law (2024). At the European Union level, multiple legislative instruments engage with the issue of online age verification, including the General Data Protection Regulation (2016), the revised Audiovisual Media Services Directive (2018), the Digital Services Act (2022), and the proposed Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (2022).
This study aims to examine the outcomes that may arise from the interaction between these distinct legal frameworks, with particular attention to their potential synergies and the difficulties that may emerge from their convergence. Although certain common challenges can be identified across these frameworks, their overall coherence and effectiveness appear to require significant improvement. These challenges often stem from the absence of precise specifications concerning the required “age verification system,” particularly with regard to the concrete verification methods to be implemented. Given the increasing availability and accessibility of artificial intelligence systems—especially those capable of estimating age through biometric data—it is necessary to consider what the future of age verification systems might entail, both in terms of the type of evidence required and the system’s overall technical and legal architecture.
Could a common “European technical solution” for age verification be envisaged? In this context, several recent developments suggest promising avenues for harmonisation across legal frameworks. The 2024 ARCOM framework in France, which regulates access to pornographic content, mandates the use of at least one system architecture ensuring “double anonymity.” This approach, alongside the current implementation of the Digital Services Act and the development of the EU Digital Identity Wallet under the 2024 eIDAS 2.0 Regulation, reflects a broader movement towards convergence in the field of online age verification.
Photo de Thomas Park sur Unsplash.
About the author:
Alexandre Humain-Lescop is a PhD researcher specialized in digital law and data protection law at the Institut Polytechnique de Paris (IP Paris – France). His research explores data-sharing regulatory frameworks and ecosystems, focusing on models, tools, and interfaces that empower data subjects to exercise meaningful control over their information, with particular emphasis on applications in the banking and financial sector as well as regarding online age verification.