New Zealand Law Commission recommends mandatory age verification and platform safety duties

The New Zealand Law Commission has released its final report on online safety, recommending the establishment of a new regulatory framework that includes mandatory age-verification requirements, enforceable safety duties for online platforms, and the creation of a dedicated online safety regulator. The report proposes that platforms must take reasonable steps to verify user ages, implement safety-by-design principles to protect children from harmful content and contact, and maintain transparent complaint and content moderation systems. The Commission also calls for penalties for non-compliance, including fines and, in severe cases, service restrictions, and emphasises the need for technology-neutral regulation that adapts as platforms and risks evolve.

Recommendations for safety-by-design and enforceable duties reflect recognition that structural controls must reach the interaction layer where harm occurs. Detection systems that identify grooming, sextortion and exploitation patterns within direct messages enable platforms and safeguarding teams to meet duty-of-care obligations with operational precision, surfacing children at acute risk for intervention rather than waiting for a report after abuse has occurred. Guardii's real-time analysis of conversation patterns across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms delivers this capability without creating a readable archive of private messages, addressing both the safety mandate and the privacy principle that safety-by-design frameworks now require.