Many issues defined the years 2020 and 2021. In addition to the obvious coronavirus pandemic and economic strife, the most prevalent issue on Capitol Hill during this time has been "big tech” companies and their business practices. This has manifested itself in a number of hearings where expert witnesses and tech executives were brought before congressional committees to speak on these practices. All of this was to determine what the government’s response ought to be. What has been lost in the debate about big tech and antitrust has been what the effect of these new bills would have on child safety. Stop Child Predators (SCP) is monitoring legislation very closely to ensure that children’s safety is not lost in the mad dash to punish big tech. This is important to SCP because the group is a team of policy experts, law enforcement officers, community leaders, and parents who launch state and federal campaigns to inform lawmakers and the public about policy changes that will protect America’s children from sexual predators.
Two bills currently under debate, the “Open App Markets Act” and the “American Choice and Innovation Online Act” would limit the ability of hardware and operating system developers to dictate which third party developers get access to their digital marketplaces. The bills operate under the premise that the selective standards of companies like Apple and Google, when it comes to their devices, is anticompetitive. These bills could open devices, platforms, and online games to child predators. This is clearly not what Congress intended to do, so they need to go back to the drawing board and stop these bills.
At a hearing titled “Protecting Kids Online: Facebook, Instagram, and Mental Health Harms,” the Senate Commerce Committee questioned Antigone Davis, Facebook’s Director of Global Safety. One of the main concerns was Facebook’s perceived lack of action when it came to illicit prostitution, sex trafficking, and child abuse being facilitated on their platform.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) accused Davis and Facebook of doing nothing about the problem for an extended time. However, Blackburn also indicated the reason that Facebook eventually took a much harder line towards addressing these key issues when she noted that, “Facebook knew about content devoted to coercing women into domestic servitude, yet they chose to do nothing to stop it, until Apple threatened to pull Facebook from the App Store.”
Blackburn, who ironically enough is one of the lead sponsors of the Open App Markets Act, raises a critical point in this discussion. Apple’s strict standards for their App Store are not born out of a desire to hurt other companies. Rather, they are there to ensure Apple’s users know the apps they are using are safe. Immediately when a company – even one as large as Facebook – runs afoul of those standards, Apple has the ability to pull it from the App Store. This is a very simple, yet important step, for the company to take to protect children and all of its customers.
Unfortunately, Blackburn’s Open App Markets Act, and the broader effort to go after app store security measures, would make the simple step of putting guard walls to protect children illegal and would subject companies like Apple to years of litigation and millions in fines. Apple also requires developers using the app store use its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) tool to give them a better idea of who is maintaining these standards. The Open App Markets Act would also make this requirement a presumed anticompetitive behavior.
It is certainly a curious thing, that after all the hearings about big tech – and even dedicating one specifically to protecting children online – the solution many have settled on is allowing potentially problematic applications a workaround to basic safety guidelines. In 2020, Apple stopped more than 1 million unsecure or potentially harmful applications from accessing the app store. Without these protections, users would be flying blind regarding the risks of potential child sex abuse online, as well as financial abuse.
In the end, these bills will create a wide-open door for app developers of all sorts to get their content on smart phone devices. Users will be left on their own to determine what is and is not safe, and that includes children online. Naturally, the likelihood of abuse skyrockets without the existing safeguards in place. While Congress looks for solutions to protect children online, they are pushing legislation that would increase those risks.
Agatha Tomasik is a Visiting Fellow with Stop Child Predators
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