Is it good to ban unpaid internships?

Agree with the above, but, devil's advocate, even making them minimum wage will mean people still having to rely on help (from Bank of mum and dad) to afford to work them.

And making them paid will mean most companies will likely stop offering them.

Instead of them being paid/unpaid perhaps there's an option to require them to have a form of scholarship behind them. So that the companies offering them have to pay, for example, a percentage of your housing or travel costs...?

Although the paid internship route would be brilliant because more students would be able to do it,
for example when I was University, I spent my holidays working full time jobs in order to survive the next year, as I got next to no support during my undergrad, whereas my wealthier course mates could do it, because they didn't have to worry about money trouble.

I think more companies would cancel them, and the competition would be so high - which leads to wealthier families with connections to the industry more likely to gain the placement anyway.

I went for an interview for an internship about a month ago, it was paid. i got rejected on the basis of not having enough experience after getting to the second round of interviews. Although internships are supposed to be the way of GETTING EXPERIENCE, and I already had a few months in the industry previously in a full time paid position. I only applied for the internship on the basis of refreshing my skills and being in a role which was fundamentally for learning. I realised this 'internship' was more a probational role, as they wanted to hire someone and test them out a few months, rather than a 'training role' per say, which sort of starts to steer internships away from their primary use of being opportunities for grads to gain work experience.
But in reality if a company is going to spend money on you, they atleast want to be getting something out of it.

What I would like to see personally, is internships with more flexible working hours rather than paid. (although paid would be nice, everyone likes getting paid) Instead of 9-5 over two-three months, maybe 9-5 three days a week over 6-12 months. That why people in financially straining situations could still hold down a part time job whilst doing a few days with a company. The amount of unpaid internships which offer 5 days a week full working hours does not really leave much room for anyone to make up the money, because let's face it - a weekend bar job won't exactly pay the bills each month.

That was my concern- that more companies will cancel them and things would be that much harder non-wealthy people to get on a good career ladder. I agree with everything you've said. It seems like a real paradox of needing proper experience in order to start getting proper experience. The idea of more flexible internships is a fantastic idea that should be more widespread if unpaid internships continue to persist.

Having them paid is a step in the right direction, although I don't see how it's going to be enforced. Unless they literally ban all volunteer work, at what point do they cut off and say "this person is an employee" versus "this person is just helping out"? Plenty of companies in the private domain have volunteers working for them, including TSR as a matter of fact.

Also since there's no protected characteristic for being poor, this doesn't stop selective hiring processes based off a person's background. Companies are free to hand out internships to wealthy kids and nobody else, paid or not.