New Zealand's under-16 bill is built like the UK's, not France's
Duties on platforms, a 10% global revenue penalty, messaging apps left out: the same design the UK picked. The politics went rather worse.
The New Zealand government introduced the Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill on 24 August 2026, which would keep under-16s off Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, X and Facebook and fine platforms up to 10% of global revenue: the same headline penalty the UK has set for spring 2027.
The mechanism is the part worth a UK parent's attention, because it is not the one a French court rejected ten days earlier. Rather than prohibiting children directly, New Zealand puts duties on the companies: high-risk platforms must take "reasonable steps" to establish age, using existing account information, digital ID, formal identification or facial age estimation, with a self-declared date of birth explicitly ruled insufficient. They must also assess and report on the risks they carry, including grooming, cyberbullying, deepfakes and algorithmic profiling, to a new regulator sitting inside the Department of Internal Affairs. That is close to how Ofcom will operate here, and a long way from the blanket ban France's Constitutional Councilstruck down on 14 August.
The scope lines are near-identical to ours as well. Messaging is out, including WhatsApp and Discord. Games are out, Roblox among them. General AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Gemini are out, though social AI companions are in. YouTube is in. That is very nearly the line the UK drew in June, which we covered in what the ban means for WhatsApp.
The politics went badly. Both coalition partners, ACT and NZ First, invoked the government's "agree to disagree" provision and refused to support the bill, and Labour lodged 79 questions before deciding its position. Prime Minister Christopher Luxonconceded it will not reach a first reading before the election, having argued the harm to children could not be accepted any longer and citing one in three 13- to 17-year-olds spending five hours a day or more on social media.
So this is a bill, not a law, and it may not become one. What it tells you is which design is spreading: platform duties policed by a regulator, rather than a prohibition aimed at children.
Nothing changes in the UK, and nothing here needs doing. The useful takeaway is that the model the UK chose is the one other countries are now copying, which makes spring 2027 more likely to arrive roughly as described. The setup guides cover the controls you can put in place without waiting for any of it.