Brussels tightens child safety as London can't collect its own fines

Writing a child-safety law is the easy part. Collecting on it is another matter. Britain's Ofcom has admitted, as The Register reports, that most of the over £7 million in fines it has issued under the Online Safety Act remain unpaid, citing its own limited enforcement powers and promising to target bigger companies next.

The European Commission adopted its own answer to the same problem this week: the EU KIDS Act would ban social media and video platforms from signing up children under 13, set a 15-year floor for ordinary accounts, and require platforms to show they are safe by design, rather than wait for a regulator to prove they aren't. None of it is law yet. The proposal still needs the European Parliament and the Council to sign off, the same road every EU digital rule travels before it can be enforced, or not, the way Ofcom's collection mechanism now isn't.

Money moved on a different front too. The European Commission-backed Scaleup Europe Fund, built to close the gap between Brussels' digital sovereignty ambitions and its bank balance, is in talks, as The Next Web reports, to join a round of over $500 million at ElevenLabs, the voice-AI company that has become this month's test case for whether that gap can actually be funded. How much of that the fund would put in is not known. ElevenLabs is registered in London, not the EU. Its founders are Polish, its expansion plans point to Poland, and a Polish state development bank already holds a stake.

Money reaching a European company is not the same as money reaching Europe.

Consumers…

For parents, the KIDS Act's concrete change would be the account floor: no account of their own under 13, and between 13 and 15 only a child account attached to a parent's, with limited contacts and screen time capped at one hour a day, if the text survives the Parliament and Council unchanged.

Germany's Federal Court gave adults a separate win, as Heise reports: consumers can rely on national law to stop an online shop from passing their data to third parties without permission, and the GDPR does not block such claims. It is a narrower ruling than it sounds. The court settled the legal route, not the case itself, which goes back to the Frankfurt appeals court; but it adds one more route consumers can use when a platform mishandles their data.

Businesses…

The fund has written large cheques before: it co-led Iceye's 1 billion euro round in August and joined Mistral's 3 billion euro Series D, so the ElevenLabs talks are a test of reach, not of size. If they close, every other late-stage European AI company weighing a Silicon Valley term sheet will be reading the terms closely.

A position paper led by Fraunhofer ISI and the University of Kassel, as Heise reports, argues against the usual Brussels complaint about data protection: that weakening GDPR would not make Europe more competitive, and that privacy-friendly design is itself a sellable advantage rather than a cost imposed on business. Founders tired of hearing compliance blamed for Europe's funding gap now have a paper to point to; the same paper concedes that start-ups and smaller firms do carry real paperwork and legal uncertainty, and asks for targeted relief rather than a lower standard.

Government…

The KIDS Act's thresholds now go to the European Parliament and the Council, the same amendment process that has diluted EU digital proposals before this one. The more useful lesson for Brussels may be sitting in London: a duty to prove a platform is safe by design is only as strong as the mechanism for collecting when it fails to, and the unpaid majority of Ofcom's £7 million in fines shows what happens when that mechanism lags behind the rule. Building the enforcement architecture alongside the KIDS Act, not after it passes, would be the difference.

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Sources

• Reported the European Commission's KIDS Act proposal limiting platform access for under-15s · European Commission Digital Strategy
• Detailed the adopted proposal's under-13 ban, 15-year account floor and safety-by-design duty · European Commission Digital Strategy
• Noted the KIDS Act still needs European Parliament and Council approval · Agenda Digitale
• Reported that Ofcom has collected only a fraction of its Online Safety Act fines · The Register
• Covered Germany's Federal Court ruling on national law and unauthorized data sharing · Heise Online
• Relayed Bloomberg's report that the Scaleup Europe Fund is in talks to invest in ElevenLabs' round of over $500 million · The Next Web
• Reported the Fraunhofer ISI and University of Kassel study on data protection and competitiveness · Heise Online