Britain Is Pushing Age Verification Laws Into US States
A wave of age verification lobbying has produced laws in American statehouses that look strikingly like each other, and an investigation published by Effort on 10 August 2026 argues that is not a coincidence. Working from lobbying disclosures, foreign agent registrations and government contract records, it traces five British organisations and their US affiliates through 42 bills in 18 states, 11 of which became law. The documents it relies on are public. What follows is what they show, and what they do not.
What the Investigation Found
The five organisations named are 5Rights Foundation, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Reset Tech and the Age Verification Providers Association. The investigation assembled its picture from Foreign Agents Registration Act filings, Lobbying Disclosure Act records in the Senate database, federal spending records on USAspending.gov, California legislative records, and UK filings at the Charity Commission and Companies House.
Those are the kinds of records that either say what the investigation claims or do not, which is the useful part. A reader who wants to check a specific number can go to the same database and look. That is a meaningfully different situation from an anonymous claim about influence, and it is the reason this piece is worth taking seriously even where its framing is sharper than its evidence.
5Rights and the California Template
The organisation at the centre is 5Rights Foundation, the British charity founded by Baroness Beeban Kidron, which the investigation says engaged on 42 bills across 18 states with 11 becoming law. Its most consequential piece of work is the one that set the pattern: California's AB 2273, the Age Appropriate Design Code, which was written on the model of the UK code of the same name. The bill's own supporting material describes it as drawing on the British Age Appropriate Design Code.
The detail the investigation puts weight on is procedural. It reports that 5Rights paid the firm Capitol Connection $50,000 to lobby the California legislature between May and September 2022, and registered that work under the Foreign Agents Registration Act only in 2024, more than a year after the bill had passed. Lobbying a state legislature is entirely legal, including for a foreign charity. Registering late is the part that matters, because the disclosure exists so that legislators and the public know who is asking while the asking is happening.
Reset Tech, CCDH and ISD: the Money Trail
Reset Tech's American affiliate spent $1,352,800 lobbying Congress and state legislatures between 2024 and the second quarter of 2026, according to the disclosure records cited. Of the six bills it lobbied on, four were bills 5Rights also engaged with, which is the overlap the investigation reads as coordination rather than coincidence. Its European entity received 4.9 million euros in EU funding as part of a consortium led by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
ISD itself appears in the piece mainly as a recipient of government money: more than 17 million dollars in contracts, of which about 11.2 million from the United States, 5.5 million from the EU and 0.7 million from the UK. The Center for Countering Digital Hate registered comparatively small amounts, totalling roughly $55,700 across four filing periods. The investigation also notes that the advocacy group America First Legal accused CCDH of FARA violations in 2024. An accusation is not a finding, and no proceeding is reported as having resolved it; the Department of Justice did not respond to the investigation's request for comment.
The VPN Question, in Their Own Words
For readers of this site the most direct part is not the money but the stated policy goal. In July 2026 Baroness Kidron published an article titled "The VPN loophole in the fight to protect children", arguing that social media restrictions which leave VPN access untouched are, in her words, for show and headlines, not for children. That is a position on the record and it is consistent: if the objective is that a minor cannot reach a service, then a tool that changes which country a connection appears to come from is an obstacle to that objective.
The counter-argument is not that children should bypass restrictions. Open Rights Group, the British digital rights organisation, set it out in a briefing in September 2025: VPN functionality ships inside Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS, anyone can stand up a private VPN on a rented server in minutes, and blocking domestic providers hands the market to offshore ones. Requiring sites to detect VPN use, ORG argues, produces false positives and excludes legitimate users while remaining unreliable. Its other observation is the one worth sitting with: the surge in VPN downloads after age checks arrive is driven mostly by adults who do not want to hand identity documents to an age-assurance vendor they have never heard of.
What the Investigation Does Not Show
Three limits deserve stating plainly. First, the author flags the engagement map as a lower bound of what the team could verify, and says the list may be incomplete, which cuts both ways. Second, no responses from the named organisations are reported, so their account of their own work is absent; all five describe their mission as child safety, and nothing in the filings contradicts that as a motive. Third, the piece moves between documented filings and characterisation, and those are different weights of evidence. A dollar figure in a Senate database is checkable. A description of a group's purpose as controlling internet speech is an interpretation, and readers should treat it as one.
It is also worth noting the outlet. Effort published an earlier instalment of the same series tracing platform lobbying on the same bills, which LWN, a technical publication not given to hyperbole, described as an extensive investigation built on public records. Neither that nor this piece has been through the correction cycle a large newsroom would apply, so the right posture is to follow the citations rather than the adjectives.
Why This Matters for Anyone Who Uses a VPN
The practical consequence is that the VPN is no longer an afterthought in these debates. It has become the named gap that campaigners want closed, which changes what the next round of bills is likely to contain. That trajectory is visible in the laws already on the books, from the state rules collected in our list of countries restricting social media by age to the moment the check moved off websites entirely and into the operating system when Illinois signed HB 5511. That last one is the honest limit of what any subscription can do for you: a VPN moves your apparent location and hides your traffic from the network, but it does not stand between an app and the device reporting your age bracket. Where a VPN still does its job is against the other half of this, the collection: an age-assurance vendor that never sees your real address learns less about you, and less collected is the only reliable protection against a future breach of a company you never chose to trust.
