For years, lawmakers at the state and federal levels have tried a variety of measures aimed at making kids safer on the internet, from kids-tailored design standards to age verification for individual websites. More recently, a new model has caught on in the states, and now it’s gaining steam in Congress: putting the onus on app stores nationwide.
The new approach to age verification orders mobile app stores to verify users’ ages, then send that information to apps when users download them. The idea has been around for a while, but it was just this year that the first of these laws was passed in Utah, quickly followed by versions in several other states. On Tuesday, it appeared in Congress as part of a package of kids safety legislation as the App Store Accountability Act (ASA), earlier introduced by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rep. John James (R-MI).
The bill is set to be discussed in a hearing before a powerful House committee that’s considering the large package of kids online safety bills. It comes just as the bill has picked up a new industry supporter, Pinterest. Companies like Meta, Snap, and X have also expressed broad support for the app store approach and applauded the federal bill when it was introduced.
The ASA might not be the most prominent bill in the House package, which is headlined by a revamped Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), but it represents an approach that so far has resonated in both red and blue states. Supporters will soon find out how well it holds up in court, too — a version of the law in Texas is currently facing a legal challenge. As with other age verification bills, opponents like the tech industry association CCIA are suing to block the Texas law, saying such a measure would violate the First Amendment by walling off large swaths of legal speech. The Supreme Court has upheld age verification laws for pornographic websites, but age-gating every app is a separate legal issue it has yet to consider.
Sweeping age verification has also proven contentious outside of the US. The UK’s Online Safety Act started requiring it in July, creating a host of issues as users found workarounds and expressed security concerns about handing over government-issued IDs or facial scans. Moving verification to the app store level could mitigate some of the concerns, but some privacy and security experts have concluded there’s no way to totally avoid the risk of revealing sensitive information.
The bill’s sponsors frame it as a straightforward solution
But the bill’s sponsors frame it as a straightforward solution — a “commonsense measure,” Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), co-sponsor of the House version, tells The Verge in a statement. Rep. James says the bill simply “holds Big Tech companies to the same standard as local corner stores.” In an interview with The Verge, Sen. Lee expresses confidence in the bill’s ability to weather First Amendment challenges — a position he notably did not hold about the Senate’s version of KOSA, which centers on a duty of care stripped out of a new House discussion draft, which would make platforms responsible for mitigating harms to kids.
Lee was one of just three senators who opposed KOSA during a vote on the Senate floor last year. That version of KOSA “doesn’t do the job that it needs to do to address some of the most significant threats to kids online, and it potentially opens the door to what could turn into political censorship by the federal government,” he tells The Verge. He worries pornographic content could still slip through the cracks to reach kids — something he’d hope to solve with a separate bill mandating age verification for porn sites — and that the definition of mental health harms in the bill could be codified by a mainstream medical association that recognizes gender dysphoria as a diagnosis. Lee’s qualms with KOSA are shared with some progressive groups that have opposed it on similar grounds, including fear that it will be used to censor transgender users, though as his concern about the medical association suggests, his worries differ dramatically in the specifics.
For industry supporters of the app store approach, placing the burden of age verification on app store operators could take some of the heat of that responsibility off of their own platforms, as well as those of many other app developers. But they also argue the policy would be far easier for consumers to navigate, rather than verifying individually across many different apps and having to share more data with each of them. Support from Pinterest and others “makes a big difference,” Lee says. Even supportive statements from Meta, whose executives often become the targets of bipartisan ire when they testify on Capitol Hill, help the cause on balance. “I’m not aware of anybody who has said, ‘Well, if Meta supports this kind of effort, then I can’t possibly,’” Lee says. “I think most people at most of these companies probably do want to protect kids.”
Lee would still welcome support from Apple and Google, the two companies that would be most immediately impacted by his legislation. But both companies have expressed concern with proposals that require data sharing with developers beyond what they think is appropriate. “Anyone running an app store will always have a lot of impact on this, prior to, or subsequent to the bill being passed,” says Lee, who was glad to see recent updates Apple made to give parents more control over kids’ accounts.
A dreaded patchwork of standards could convince more companies to come on board
As the app store age verification model proliferates through the states, companies are beginning to see a dreaded patchwork of standards, which could convince more of them to come on board with a version they could live with. With the passage of California’s version of an app store age reporting law, there’s already beginning to be a more varied landscape of state bills.
The California law has some distinct features, like limiting enforcement to the attorney general. It also doesn’t require app stores to independently verify users’ reported ages. Instead, they need to prompt users to indicate their birthdate on the device and send those age range signals to app developers when downloading an app. Developers who come to learn that a user is a different age than the one provided by the app store aren’t safeguarded for disregarding that information simply by relying on the app store signals. Those differences helped it pick up Google as an endorser, though Apple has yet to make a similar move.
“The need for a federal standard is urgent,” Pinterest CEO Bill Ready wrote in a letter to James, the House sponsor of the federal bill, announcing the company’s endorsement. “A single national approach would reduce fragmentation while giving families one simple place to approve the apps their teens download.”
The direction of the legal challenge over Texas’ law, which would otherwise take effect in January, could have important lessons for a similar federal law. But Lee doesn’t see a need to wait to see how it plays out. “I’m pretty confident in going ahead with it as is. I don’t believe that there’s anything unlawful, unconstitutional, or otherwise problematic about this legislation,” he says. “There’s certainly no reason to delay.”
