The App Store Accountability Act (ASAA), now under consideration in Congress, is unconstitutional. It would require every user of a mobile device to verify his age, preconditioning access to the everyday digital services of modern life on the provision of a government-issued identification or biometrics. These data are given over to platforms and verification services whose databases, through malice or ordinary human error, have often proven far from secure. Before allowing an underage user to download an application, app stores would have to secure parental consent. A Bible app or Khan Academy would fall subject to the ASAA’s show-your-papers regime as much as Instagram or Snapchat. This the First Amendment cannot tolerate. The policy “is akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door,” a federal judge wrote in December, as he enjoined the State of Texas’s version of the ASAA.
The ASAA’s appeal is, nonetheless, intense: it is advanced as a means “to empower parents and protect children,” which, amid the uncertainty of a technologically unfamiliar world, seems to most to be worth ends. To avoid begging the question, however, it must be determined whether the ASAA is likely to achieve its aims. It is not, a fact which forces a reconsideration of the tradeoffs inherent in its policies. Any compromise with respect to the First Amendment and free speech, however objectionable, might seem palatable to many American voters if children were to benefit from substantial new protections. But the bill promises to enact no such protections; it is rife with costs and contains little benefit.
To begin with, the ASAA would mandate no child-safety features that do not exist already on the app stores operated by Apple and Google. In fact, Apple and Google provide more granular and powerful tools than any found in the bill’s provisions, as the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), the trade group that challenged the Texas statute, argued in its complaint. “The Act’s predominant effect is…to remove parental choice by imposing a one-size-fits-all, paternalistic restriction on the many millions of app store offerings (including books, movies, and games) and app store users, regardless of age and user preference,” CCIA argued.
The ASAA would constrain parents’ decision-making, but its standard would be codified into a mandate. “This shift would change parental controls from ‘opt-out,’ where parents actively choose where to limit access, to ‘opt-in,’ where parents must take time to allow access to all the content they want their children to view,” explain the Reason Foundation’s Max Gulker and Caden Rosenbaum. What heretofore has been a parental choice would become a mandate enforced by statute. In this, the bill’s advocates take solace, presuming that American parents would deny a substantial number of their children’s download requests. But this is an uncertain proposition. Although many parents worry deeply about their children’s use of technology, many others—with or without misgivings—facilitate it. I have observed this growing up in an increasingly digital world and as a teacher and tutor of grade-school children. The sight of a toddler at a restaurant submerged in a device during a family dinner is not unfamiliar in anno Domini 2026. A single federal statute cannot be counted on to revolutionize the thinking, habits, and choices of upwards of 80 million families in the United States—particularly considering that robust parental controls currently exist on nearly every American child’s phone or tablet.
Parents often report that the most potent word in child-rearing—No!—becomes practically unsayable when confronting the digital questions. Much of children’s socialization now occurs on social media, and cultural literacy increasingly means literacy of online culture. Deprive a ninth grader of Instagram, and he will be deprived of much of the social life his friends enjoy. The problem of social media and children is, in this respect, a network effect. The ASAA would not, however, erase this problem. The bill would not forbid any child, per se, from downloading Instagram or Snapchat, or losing hours or days to YouTube or Netflix. Many parents will discover that their predicament is unaltered: If the parents of Johnny’s classmates have approved the downloading of these apps, Johnny and his parents will continue to feel constrained to go along with the digital norms of the social circle.
Moreover, the ASAA ignores the dangers children encounter online after apps are downloaded and bedroom doors are closed. Instead, the bill conveys to parents “a false sense of security,” as John Tamny puts it. A single, rigid, and ineffective federal standard cannot, ontologically, substitute for vigilant parents watching over their children in the digital world as they do in the physical one. Children specialize in flouting rules and finding trouble. Congress cannot know American children for who they are or understand their individual personalities, needs, desires, interests, and psychological vulnerabilities. It cannot see American children every day or observe their behaviors and moods and habits and tics. Only parents can accomplish such a task—a monumental task, yes, but one parents have taken on since the earliest dawn of mankind.
Perhaps most gallingly, unconstitutional and ineffectual proposals consume finite political energy that could, if lawmakers more fully understood their subject, power legislation that would protect children. Digital-education curricula, such as Florida’s, would help families to harness the safety tools at their disposal. The Invest in Child Safety Act, introduced in the 118th Congress by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), would fund law enforcement to apprehend and convict online child predators, many of whom now traverse the internet freely. These would be worthy efforts, and constitutional ones, better suited “to empower parents and protect children” than the ASAA.
David B. McGarry is the research director of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.
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