France's under-15 ban falls, and age-gating now has to pass a proportionality test

France's Constitutional Council struck down the bill that would have barred under-15s from social media from September, holding that the restrictions disproportionately infringe minors' right to freedom of expression and communication ^[1][2]. The Council did not dispute that protecting children is a legitimate aim ^[3], which is the part product teams should read twice: the objective survived and the instrument did not ^[16].

The grounds are specific enough to work backwards from. First, breadth. The law exempted online encyclopedias, educational and scientific directories, and platforms for developing and sharing free software or open-source educational projects ^[5], but not collaborative services for sharing leisure, information or mutual aid content, not online communication applications, not online games with strong collaborative and social features, and not social networks created in connection with educational activities ^[6]. On that carve-out list, the Council found the ban likely to reach services whose risks to minors' health and safety, whether from content or mode of operation, are not established ^[7]. A gate justified per cohort is not enough; the justification has to attach to the service.

Second, parental authority. Neither the contested provisions nor any other provision set out how a parent or legal representative, informed of the risks and safeguards of a given service, could lift the prohibition, narrow it, or authorise access to particular services ^[8]. The Council also noted the prohibition triggered no particular assessment of risk to the individual minor ^[9]. In product terms, that is an override flow, a disclosure surface, and a per-child record, none of which the statute contemplated.

Third, and most directly operational: the Council flagged that an under-15 ban cannot be enforced without making every user, adults included, prove their age, and the law demanded exactly that without defining a single condition, limit, or technical standard for how verification would work ^[4]. Anyone who has sat through an age-assurance vendor pitch recognises the gap. The mandate created an obligation to verify and left the specification to be invented downstream, and the court treated that absence as part of the defect rather than an implementation detail.

The timing matters for planning. President Emmanuel Macron wanted the ban in force within months, timed to the return to school ^[11], and framed the speed as an advantage: "France is leading the way in Europe in protecting our children and our teenagers," he said. "We will keep on going" ^[10]. France moved first in the EU while the wider bloc worked through a slower process on which levers to pull ^[12]. The bill was blocked before the September start date it was written for ^[17]. Techdirt, which read a machine translation of the short ruling, argues every other EU country should take the result as a warning ^[15][18].

There is a precedent on enforcement, too. Techdirt reports that Australia's ban, the model others copied, is not going well, with a majority of kids working around it and the excluded skewing toward the most marginalised ^[13]; the publication also asserts that gambling companies pushed the Australian ban as an alternative to banning gambling ads ^[14].

Watch for a successor bill that names specific harms, keeps the exemption list wide, and writes a parental override into the statute, because those are the three holes the Council punched ^[16]. Watch, separately, for whether any drafter anywhere puts a verification standard in the text rather than leaving it to procurement ^[4].