The app store is the enforcement mechanism kids’ safety needs
The House just passed the KIDS Act, and they managed to strip out the one provision that actually mattered. Duty of care is gone. Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn, the two senators who spent four years building the Kids Online Safety Act, are now calling the House's own bill dead on arrival. This is the same fight that has killed every version of KOSA since 2022, and it will keep killing every version until Congress stops trying to solve this problem from the wrong end of the pipe.
Duty of care asks platforms to design their products responsibly for minors, but a duty only means something if you can enforce it, and it is impossible to do so if you cannot reliably tell who a minor is. Every fight over KOSA's duty of care provision eventually collapses into the same argument: give platforms an open-ended obligation to protect kids from harm, and either they ignore it because enforcement is toothless, or an FTC and a patchwork of state attorneys general use it to police lawful speech because the definition of harm was never pinned down. Critics on both the left and the right are worried about the same structural flaw: KOSA tries to regulate content and conduct without first solving the identity problem underneath it.
That is where the App Store Accountability Act comes in, and why it deserves to be treated as the load-bearing half of this fight.
Instead of asking every social platform, every game studio, and every app on Earth to build its own age verification system, ASAA puts that responsibility at the two chokepoints through which virtually every app on a phone gets distributed. Apple and Google already control the gate for access, and the ASAA just requires them to check ID at the gate once, categorize the user, and pass that category downstream so developers know whether they are dealing with a child, a teenager, or an adult. A duty of care regime built on top of that is enforceable in a way that a general duty of care regime built on nothing is not.
Read more in the Washington Examiner.
