On May 19, 2026, Martin Ajdari, president of France's Autorité de régulation de la communication audiovisuelle et numérique (ARCOM), unveiled the regulator's 2026-2028 strategic plan. Structured around three priority axes and twelve objectives, the plan sets two commitments that will test the credibility of French digital regulation over the next three years.
First: ARCOM intends to begin enforcing France's pending under-15 social media ban in September 2026. A bill prohibiting Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Snapchat from issuing accounts to children under fifteen — and requiring removal of existing ones — cleared the French Senate on March 31, 2026, and is now in second reading at the National Assembly. ARCOM is designated as enforcement authority. Second: the regulator plans to expand SREN age-verification enforcement beyond the pornographic sites it currently polices to a broader category of adult platforms, covering age-restricted services well beyond explicit video.
What SREN Actually Does
France's SREN law — LOI n° 2024-449, enacted on May 21, 2024 — gave ARCOM a substantially upgraded enforcement toolkit. The law authorises administrative fines and platform-blocking orders without requiring prior judicial approval, a departure from France's traditional court-first approach to content regulation. In October 2024, ARCOM published a technical framework requiring age-verification providers to be independent third parties and to offer at least one "double-blind" method — meaning neither the platform nor the verification service can link an identity profile to a user's activity. A February 2025 executive order extended SREN's reach to seventeen pornographic services based elsewhere in the EU, asserting French jurisdiction over geo-accessible platforms regardless of corporate domicile.
Ajdari cited a roughly 50% reduction in minors' time on pornographic sites as an early result of this enforcement posture. That is a real outcome worth noting.
The Case for Aggressive Enforcement
The data behind France's push is not manufactured. ARCOM's strategic plan cites research showing that 83% of minors under eighteen are regularly exposed to at least one online risk — dangerous challenges, cyberbullying, scams, violent or sexually explicit content. Forty-four percent of young people aged 11 to 17 first accessed social networks before their thirteenth birthday, well below the platform-set minimums that have never been enforced. Regulators who look at those numbers and do nothing have made a policy choice, not a neutral stance. If age verification genuinely drove a halving of minors' exposure on pornographic platforms, it demonstrates that enforcement-with-teeth has measurable protective effects. The normative case for building stronger regulatory infrastructure around children's digital experiences is grounded, not invented.
Where the Proportionality Problem Sits
The concern is not with the goal but with the instrument and its costs. Age verification at scale imposes friction and privacy risk on every user — not just the minority who arrive underage. The double-blind model ARCOM mandates is technically thoughtful, but it creates a new class of private identity intermediaries who hold sensitive verification data, with their own failure modes and expansion tendencies. Identity infrastructure built for one regulatory purpose rarely stays bounded.
The proportionality problem also has a practical dimension. ARCOM's current budget sits at approximately €50 million, with a headcount ceiling of 378 full-time equivalent positions. Ajdari acknowledged in his May 19 address that since 2022 — the year the DSA entered force and SREN began its legislative journey — ARCOM has obtained around twenty additional positions, "far fewer than our main European counterparts." The strategic plan requests approximately thirty more positions over the 2026-2028 period, with an explicit warning that current resourcing is insufficient for both the DSA national coordinator mandate and SREN enforcement.
An underfunded regulator with expansive powers will enforce selectively. The practical consequence is that compliance pressure concentrates on the largest, most visible US platforms — Meta, TikTok, X — which have legal teams, public affairs capacity, and strong incentives to negotiate. Smaller operators, including European adult platforms and niche social networks, fall through the gaps. That is not proportionate enforcement; it is enforcement as political signal.
The DSA Layering Risk
ARCOM is also France's designated national Digital Services Act coordinator, responsible for coordinating cross-border investigations with other member states and feeding into the European Commission's oversight of very large online platforms. That mandate already demands substantial institutional bandwidth. Layering aggressive SREN enforcement on top risks creating parallel tracks — French administrative proceedings under SREN and Brussels-level proceedings under DSA for functionally overlapping conduct on the same platforms. France had legitimate reasons to want national tools alongside supranational ones when SREN passed; but the current architecture needs clearer deconfliction mechanisms before the two regimes begin generating contradictory obligations on the same services.
The under-15 social media ban faces its own legal stress test. The 2023 Marcangeli law set an identical 15-year digital majority and was never implemented because its consent mechanism did not survive DSA compatibility review. The current bill is designed to fix that failure, but verifying the age of social media users at scale is technically harder than verifying age for adult video sites — there are more platforms, more account types, and more creative workarounds available to motivated teenagers.
The Honest Bottom Line
ARCOM's resource problem is not an abstract concern. Thirty additional staff over three years, at European regulatory salary rates, is a modest investment relative to the governance weight France is placing on this institution. If the French government wants a credible digital enforcement regime rather than a sequence of well-publicised announcements, it needs to answer the budget question before September. A regulator that cannot adequately staff its mandate will enforce the mandate badly — and the people who pay for that are the very minors the regulation is designed to protect.