Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri wishes to keep children away from social media. Introducing the Making Age-Verification Technology Uniform, Robust, and Effective (MATURE) Act last year, Hawley explained that Big Tech companies were “neglecting our children’s health and monetizing their personal information,” and were “complicit in their exploitation and manipulation.” To fix this, Hawley proposed that Congress prevent social-media companies from accepting users under the age of 16 and give parents the power to sue those companies when they declined to comply. “It’s time,” Hawley concluded, “to give parents the weapons they need to strike back.”

Such bills are currently all the rage. Senator Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii) has one, called the “Protecting Kids on Social Media Act,” that would bar kids younger than 13 from social media completely, require kids between 13 and 18 to obtain parental permission before they can create an account, impose age-verification rules on every single user who frequents them, and empower the Federal Trade Commission to punish sites that do not acquiesce. Senator Mike Lee (R., Utah) has one titled the “Shielding Children’s Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net (SCREEN) Act,” which would force websites that host pornography to adopt an FCC-approved age-verification system on pain of penalty and injunctive relief. In the states, versions of both these ideas are ubiquitous, and many have been passed into law.

Most of my fellow conservatives seem to be thrilled by this development in our national life. Indeed, two years ago, Christine Rosen wrote a cover story in favor of the idea in this very magazine. I, however, am not thrilled. Instead, I am worried that we are on the verge of destroying the internet as we have known it, by outsourcing the work of civil society to a bureaucracy that cannot be trusted. Calvin Coolidge once said that “it is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones,” and, in my estimation, these are bad bills. Were I in Congress, I would resist all of them.

This is not, I ought to record, because I think that the problems that they seek to address are false. On the contrary: Those problems are both real and serious. Social media can serve as a hotbed of bullying, catastrophizing, and negativity, as well as act as a conduit for information that is best reserved for adults. Pornography has a self-evidently undesirable effect on children and teenagers, robbing them of their innocence and giving them ludicrous ideas about the nature of interpersonal relationships and physical intimacy. Like many who have called for government regulation, I am persuaded by the available evidence that it would be beneficial to limit minors’ exposure to both. As a parent myself, I intend to do just that.

Nor do I have philosophical or legal objections to the idea. There is nothing in my classical-liberal worldview that balks at our preventing minors from accessing pornography, inappropriate movies, inadequately moderated social-media websites, or anything else that adult citizens believe is bad for them; there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that would forbid legislation that attempted to achieve that aim; and, for once, this area is clearly within the federal government’s regulatory ambit. Were there a way for Congress to superintend children’s use of the internet without destroying that internet in the process, I would be entirely open to considering it.

But I don’t think that there is — and, frankly, I’m not willing to take the risk in order to find out whether I’m right. Thomas Sowell famously observed that “there are no solutions, there are only trade-offs,” and so it is here. The downside of an open and free internet is that some information will be made accessible to people for whom it is not suitable. The downside of government intervention is the guarantee of a fractured internet and the possibility of a sprawling and censorious bureaucracy that acts far beyond its statutory role. On balance, I consider the former problem to be preferable to the latter — and so, I suspect, would most conservatives once the scale of the change that is being proposed became clear.

Advocates of mandatory online age-verification like to point out that, however diligent parents might be, their attempts to keep their kids away from harmful material will inevitably fail after a certain point. This is correct — and critics of the idea such as I ought to acknowledge it. One can lock down one’s home network, install monitoring software on one’s devices, and switch on every parental-control option available, but these measures will count for precisely nothing if the bad kid on the school bus has a smartphone of his own and uses it to show explicit videos to everyone else. To enforce a strict set of rules against him, the argument goes, would require a blanket approach that is attached to the supply rather than to the demand, and only Congress can provide such a law.

In theory, this makes some sense. Practically, however, I consider it wildly naïve — not least because the same scaling problem exists on both the supply side and the demand side. Those explicit videos that our hypothetical kid on the bus is accessing: They are absolutely everywhere. Four percent of all websites on the internet — that’s about 25 million sites — host pornography. Thirteen percent of Web searches are for pornographic material. At the latest count, there were estimated to be around 10,000 terabytes of porn online (that’s about 2 million times more data than can be written to a standard DVD). In reality, there are only two possible consequences of a federal attempt to implement meaningful restrictions on minors’ access to pornography: 1) abject failure, or 2) an internet that works much differently from the one we currently have.

It is perhaps worth pausing here to remind ourselves of how truly extraordinary America’s version of the internet really is. By explicit design, the system that we use is both heavily decentralized and almost entirely unsupervised. There are a small number of centrally administered components (domain names and IP addresses) and a handful of protocols and conventions that participants have voluntarily consented to standardize (HTTP/S, SMTP, the use of common port numbers, etc.), but, beyond that, it remains a free-for-all. To start a website in America, you need a domain name (you can buy one for as little as 99 cents, and nobody can stop you), an IP address (you already have one, from your ISP), a computer running some free open-source software (that could be the one you’re reading this on), and . . . that’s it. Certainly, there are some laws governing what you may do online. But those laws are all enforced after the fact. In the United States, you need nobody’s permission to start doing whatever you’re doing online, and, once you’ve started doing it, it is extremely difficult for the government to make you stop. Individual services — be they Facebook, Gmail, or Eddie’s Rollercoaster Blog — can choose whether or not they wish to associate with you. But the internet per se is agnostic.

I like this system. As a matter of fact, I like this system so much that I have taken to calling myself an “internet hippie.” At 39, I am a lot younger than the pioneers who made the internet what it is, but I share their vision, which was for a system that, in John Gilmore’s phrase, “interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” In my estimation, the two biggest contributors to this arrangement are a) the near-total lack of barriers to entry, and b) the near-total lack of regulation as to what is available online. Clearly, a federal law that required millions of websites to implement age-verification systems would alter this balance considerably. When applied to social media, it would instantly guarantee that four of the five most popular sites in the United States (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) were accessible only after one had sent one’s private information across the Web. When applied to pornography, it would ultimately necessitate the granting of far-reaching powers that permitted the government to shut down — or forcibly limit access to — any of the 25 million venues that refused to comply (many of which are hosted abroad, and thus exist outside of the U.S. government’s scope). I do not consider either of these outcomes desirable.

Nor do I think that the project would end there. Once the principle had been conceded, and the department established and unionized, it would grow like any other. The War on Drugs did not begin in its current form. It “escalated” — or, rather, it was escalated — over time. What in recent American history makes anyone think that a federal agency that had been tasked with keeping minors “safe” on the internet would stay happily within its intended bounds? Frankly, I am astonished that I must ask this question. In recent years, conservatives have complained bitterly about the moderation decisions of private tech companies, noting in particular that the preposterously broad definition of “safety” that was first contrived within academia had bled out into the social-media realm and been assiduously weaponized against the Right. Now, they lambast Mark Zuckerberg for not doing enough to keep their kids safe, and ask their congressman to hand that work over to Washington, D.C. Have they run mad?

That’s not rhetorical. I’d honestly like to know. Given the perpetual gridlock in Congress, American presidents have taken to scouring hastily passed laws in the hope that this phrase or that can be twisted into a permission slip for their agenda. Barack Obama did this to advance his immigration aims. Donald Trump did this to steal money for his wall. Joe Biden has tried doing it to “forgive” student loans, to impose a moratorium on private evictions, and to mandate vaccinations. Am I expected to believe that a law whose purpose is to keep children safe would not be improperly extended in that way? National Review is caustically critical of medical procedures that attempt to “change” the gender of children by permanently lopping off their body parts. To us, this is common sense. To our critics, however, we are engaged in a “trans genocide.” At present, we can write whatever we want on this topic without anyone being able to decide who can read it. Were the federal government to be granted the power to impose age limits on websites that it considers dangerous or unsuitable for minors, that might change. I would not recommend that we test this.

Which is to say that, ultimately, I do not consider the practical questions that result from abuse of the internet to be meaningfully different from the practical questions that result from anything else. That the free flow of data presents challenges to those of us who are raising children is obvious. That the best response is to limit that free flow, however, is not. Chesterton’s internet has stood in its current form for nearly three decades now. To knock it over before every other avenue had been explored would be many things indeed — but conservative isn’t among them.