It's my pleasure to give you all an update on our recent workshop that we had as advertised: the age-based restrictions on content access workshop.

It may come as no surprise to you why we decided we might want to have a workshop.

You've probably been noticing a lot of different jurisdictions have been rolling out a lot of regulations around child's access to content online.

These regulations and the requirements of these regulations can have significant effects on things like the technical architectures underpinning the Internet and the web, and on the experience of end users.

This is a very complicated domain with a lot of players, a lot of moving parts, there's a lot of misunderstandings going on, and the regulation is moving fast.

So our question was what could we do in technical standards to help this situation?

Now this is a chunk out of our call for participation.

This was a joint action between the Internet Architecture Board over on the IETF side and the W3C.

We jointly convened the workshop.

This is a pretty big problem across the Internet space, and we decided we would join forces at this point, but also to have a focus on the technical and architectural components of this problem space.

Now you'll note on the call for participation, we did not expect to identify a solution here, and surprisingly that didn't happen in the couple of days that we had, that we had a single solution, but we did mostly have the goal to have a better understanding of the space and to have a collaborative conversation.

So here's a snapshot of the agenda.

We had everyone introduced to each other and the group of participants who were going to have a deep and thoughtful discussion, so we framed that so that we would have a great productive time together, going through some hard questions.

And we started with some guiding principles in two main areas around human rights and around architectures of the Internet and the web, and we just had a reference made to a couple of documents we found very helpful in this discussion were the ethical web principles and the privacy principles document.

So we were looking at the potential impacts of the decisions that are made, how do they uphold or are they detrimental to these rights?

So we are trying to uphold freedom of expression if we're trying to decrease fragmentation online, what happens when we make particular choices?

We had discussions around where enforcement happens.

There are different, again, players of people who are enforcing policy or verifying age have different roles to play.

And then we looked at available techniques.

So age verification gets used a lot as a term, but it's not the only thing one can be applying as a solution in this area.

But we looked at verification around server-side solutions, so things like maybe a government identity, a digital system, or maybe selective disclosure from zero knowledge proofs.

We were looking at age estimation or inference, so again, maybe biometrics that are trying to make an age judgment based on your face, solutions that were more in-network, kind of filtering content, or maybe on-device, where you have ability for the device to step in as part of the enforcement process, and had a very long interactive discussion.

This was a very interactive session, so we had a lot of very thoughtful comments that came out of this.

So a few fast facts here.

This was a two-and-a-half-day workshop.

As mentioned, it was the beginning of October.

It was held in London.

We had 36 attendees, three of them were remote, and we had ourselves three observers from the TAG and IAB.

We did manage to get some representation from a few different groups here.

So there were industry people, so you had browser folks, but also those who were doing solutions for age verification, for example.

We had government from a few different countries.

We had civil society, and we had some researchers from academia as well.

There were nine very short presentations that were used to tee up each of those conversations that I mentioned on the agenda.

And there were 28 papers that were accepted and publicized, and I put the link up there.

If you would like to read these papers, the slides from some of the presentations are also available there, so I encourage you to go there and have a look.

We had, in the discussion, given the nature of the subject matter, it was a Chatham House rule, so we're able to report out what was said but not attribute it to the people who said it.

So I have a few observations that I'm gonna share with you in the short time I have up here.

There was recognition that coordination among all of these different groups has been really difficult.

You have the technical space, the policy space, you've got industry players who are in here, a lot of different people with different priorities, different requirements, different cultures, different vocabularies, all trying to have conversations, and this has been very difficult.

The participants at the workshop were very eager to have more discussion.

They were very happy to have the ability to collaborate with other people who were working in this space.

They were very glad to hear from each other.

They were all saying they really liked being able to be in the same space with other people working on this issue, people with different perspectives, with a different piece of the problem, with a different piece of expertise from what they had, and coming together they found very valuable.

And there's also a note, of course, that we took a technical perspective just because that was our area and our focus, but the goal of this really is to help children's experience online and that isn't really just a technical problem.

There are lots of people involved in this.

There are families involved in this, and there are schools and communities and lots of other players, and so they are very much an important component of this.

So this is not something that's going to be solved through technical solutions.

It's going to involve a lot more people.

We also took a moment to ask the participants what items they found particularly helpful, important takeaways, things they thought would be necessary to make progress, and so I've grabbed a few of those here.

People did appreciate the discussion of there being different roles in enforcement, so that helped them clarify who the different players were and where information was flowing and where the different choke points might be.

It was helpful having things like clear architectural diagrams, so you were able to put all the pieces down and then do analysis about, again, what are the different risks to the different approaches and the implications of the choices.

People also liked hearing about some of the limitations.

There's privacy enhancing technologies, but some of them aren't quite ready for prime time yet and they have a lot of promise, but they may not yet be ready to be relied upon and people were very happy to hear about things like issues around zero knowledge proofs and what they can and cannot do.

There was some user research presented and people were very happy to hear what end users are thinking about when they're asked for things for their age to do proofs, for example, how are they feeling about that?

This seems to be an under-studied area and participants really wanted a shared vocabulary in order to have a commonality of the terms, so they're all more or less talking on the same page.

So the next steps, currently working on the workshop report.

The chairs are saying, well, fingers crossed, maybe the end of the year, we're working hard.

You'll note I talked about policy in here.

We think it's important to strengthen the relationships with the policy makers.

So I'll mention that we've kicked off a policy engagement initiative and this was a very helpful thing for all of us to connect with some people in that space.

Obviously, people want to continue to collaborate and we're trying to figure out what the right venue might be for that and how we might help make that happen.

It can't all be us.

Again, it's a large group.

There's an immediate next step.

There's a breakout right after this session, in fact, about this and this topic.

And so if you want to join us in room 402, we would be happy to have you.

So thank you and please contact me at any time about any of this and I'm happy to talk about it.

Thank you.