A special EU panel handed European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen its report on children's online safety in Brussels on Monday, and its central sentence flipped the usual burden of proof. "Until they demonstrate that their services are safe by design," the report said, "social media and other digital services providers should have restricted access to children under the age of 13 in the EU" [1]. The panel, co-chaired by Maria Melchior, did not ask parents to police their kids off the apps. It asked the companies to earn access.

Von der Leyen, a doctor by training, went further than the report at the microphone. Children under 3 should have no screen exposure at all, she told reporters, and those under 13 should get only "time-limited" access supervised by parents, teachers or other caregivers. "I believe we need to consider phased and gradual access for different age ranges because childhood won't wait and once it's gone, we can never give it back," she said. The panel also urged EU countries to weigh "further precautionary age restrictions" for those over 13.

Here is the gap a reader should hold onto. The platform-side framing rests on existing terms of service, most of which already set a floor of 13, and on the argument that supervision is a parent's job. The panel and von der Leyen reject that division of labor: they put the onus on providers to prove safety before children get in, not on families to keep them out. This is a recommendation, not a rule. The report "is likely to influence von der Leyen's thinking," and she and the Commission "are likely to come up with a proposal for the 27 member countries to weigh in the near future" [1] — a recommendation aimed at a future proposal, not a law that binds anyone today.

The Commission is not waiting on the panel to act elsewhere. Last week it invoked its Digital Safety Act to warn Meta that it must disable addictive design features such as infinite scrolling, which von der Leyen singled out, or face a heavy fine [1]. The Commission is also building its own age-verification app, meant to let users prove their age while keeping their identity anonymous. Von der Leyen's proposals carry unusual weight with member states, which is why a non-binding report can still bend the eventual rule.

Europe is arriving late to a fight others picked. Australia, Turkey, Indonesia and other countries have passed outright bans on children under 16 or 15 using platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and Instagram [1]. The EU panel stopped short of a hard ban, choosing a conditional gate keyed to whether a service is "safe by design." The gate has no enforcement date, no verification method member states have agreed to accept, and no penalty for a provider that lets an under-13 through. Those are the pieces that would turn Monday's recommendation into an operating rule, and none of them are settled.

-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin