No one should be surprised that a law born in the age of platform monopolies reaches for biometric control as its favourite tool. You begin with a reasonable demand, keep children away from the worst material, and you end with a culture where it feels natural to show your face to a corporation simply to watch a stranger talk into a camera. The Online Safety Act gives Ofcom frightening leverage, fines measured in slices of global turnover, and it is hardly shocking that Amazon would rather build a face gate on Twitch than risk a political flogging. The language around the new system is reassuring in the usual way, on device processing, no storage of raw images, clever maths that forgets you. People forget that every surveillance regime in history has worn similar phrases like perfume while it settled in. Once citizens accept that their features can be tested on demand for the privilege of speaking or listening, the question of where that power is aimed becomes a matter of fashion, not of principle. Today it guards mature streams, tomorrow it may guard dissent, satire, the sort of awkward speech that online safety bureaucrats quietly wish would go away. If you doubt that drift, look at how quickly tools built for terrorism, for immigration, for public order are repurposed once they exist and once people are tired of arguing about them.