When governments start telling children they cannot have an Instagram account, we are watching more than a domestic policy experiment — we are witnessing the geopolitics of childhood.

In Canberra, lawmakers have leapt where others have cautiously tiptoed. Australia’s Online Safety Amendment requires major platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, X and others to take reasonable steps to prevent under-16s from creating accounts, with penalties amounting to tens of millions of dollars. It is not a sentimental reaction. It is a blunt instrument born of alarm: policymakers point to soaring reports of self-harm content, grooming and relentless peer harassment and have decided the public interest trumps platform laissez-faire. The law will take effect in late 2025, and platforms that fail to comply will face fines of approximately $49.5 million. 

Indonesia — a country where smartphone ownership and informal digital economies have spread at breakneck speed — is watching closely, and the stakes feel personal. While the Indonesian government will not impose sanctions on children or parents who fail to access their children’s access to social media, it will, however, impose sanctions on social media platforms that allow children to create accounts without parental supervision.

The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund’s (UNICEF) 2023 baseline study in Indonesia finds a chilling intimacy to the harms: half of the children surveyed reported seeing sexual images on social media, and nearly as many had experienced bullying online. These are not abstract statistics; they are the digital watermarks on children’s developing brains. An Indonesian adolescent mental-health survey reveals that about 35% of teenagers face mental-health challenges — a sobering reminder that online exposure adds to already fragile safety nets. 

Economic implications of banning young users

So what should Jakarta do? Copy Canberra exactly, or craft something else entirely? The answer matters not just for Indonesian households, but also for international trust in how states govern the global internet. If each nation builds separate walls — biometrics here, parental-consent schemes there — the internet’s patchwork will become a mosaic of enforcement regimes that global platforms must navigate, often by moving data and decision-making offshore.

That is not a hypothetical: analysts warn that uncoordinated national measures risk fragmentation, eroding the predictability that underpins cross-border trade, diplomacy and the internet’s architecture itself. 

Australia’s policy has virtues. It places responsibility on platforms rather than criminalizing children or slapping fines on parents. It forces the tech giants to reckon with the design choices that engineer engagement out of young minds. Already, tech firms have begun moving: in recent weeks, major platforms prepared for mass account deactivations, offering users a frantic set of choices — download your data, freeze your profile or lose the lot — as compliance deadlines approach. That operational reality is a reminder that law can and does change the behavior of global companies. 

But there are real trade-offs. Age-verification systems can become surveillance vectors. Banning young people from mainstream platforms may simply push them into shadow networks — encrypted apps and forums where harm is harder to prevent. And in countries like Indonesia, where kidfluencer economies and informal monetization provide real incomes for vulnerable families, sweeping bans risk unintended economic harm. The policy challenge is therefore twofold: to protect children while preserving privacy, and to restrain exploitative commercialization without criminalizing livelihoods. 

Pioneering a regional solution

This moment calls for diplomatic imagination as much as domestic courage. Indonesia should not reflexively import Canberra’s model or recoil from it. Instead, Jakarta could pioneer a regional solution that binds protection to privacy and harmonizes enforcement across the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Imagine a federated Age-Assurance Trust: trusted national institutions — schools, telcos and welfare agencies — would verify a young person’s age and issue cryptographic tokens for platform access. Platforms would accept the token without hoovering up identity data. Such a system would preserve privacy, reduce the incentive for invasive biometrics, and create auditable standards that neighbouring countries could endorse. It would also convert a domestic policy into a regional public good — a step away from the fragmentation Chatham House warns about and toward shared regulatory infrastructure.

Complemented by a Child Data-Fiduciary statute — which treats earnings, content and data generated by minors as subject to escrow and welfare protections — this architecture could blunt the economic fallout on families while outlawing exploitative monetization. Crucially, a robust nationwide education campaign and teacher training will support it: without literacy, bans are merely window dressing. UNICEF’s Indonesian study makes this plain — children need skills, channels to report harm and adults who can respond. 

Understanding the foreign-policy dimension of digital rules

The foreign-policy dimension is unavoidable. Digital rules today are signals to partners about how a country governs risk, liberty and commerce. If Indonesia champions a rights-respecting, interoperable regional approach, it would not only protect its children — it would also help write the global playbook for how democracies govern the attention economy. If it chooses unilateral bans and creates ad hoc verification regimes, it will push others into defensive regulatory silos, raising transaction costs and undermining trust.

Policymakers sometimes speak as if childhood is a private matter, best handled at the kitchen table. But the architecture of attention is public. The platforms that sculpt young minds are global; the harms are local, but the supply chains and data flows are international. Canberra’s law has broken a taboo: governments can and increasingly will set limits on corporate attention extraction.

Indonesia has an opportunity to respond not by mimicry but by innovation — to protect its young people while building mechanisms that neighboring states can join. That would be a foreign-policy move equal in gravity to any treaty: making the region where children’s rights and digital rights converge, and where the rest of the world can look and learn.

[Liam Roman edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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