This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the action (and inaction) of lawmakers seeking to rein in tech platforms, follow Lauren Feiner. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.
In the offline world, age verification is often as simple as flashing a cashier your driver’s license to buy a pack of beer, or an adult magazine (for whoever still does this kind of thing). Advocates for stronger barriers preventing children from accessing online porn have long argued for an equivalent on the internet: online age verification. The idea comes with different challenges than those that exist in the physical world, like the possibility of that information getting hacked, which could be enough to chill consumers from trying to access legal speech. In a 2004 Supreme Court ruling, Ashcroft v. ACLU, the justices found that age verification couldn’t be mandated on porn sites since policymakers had yet to show that less burdensome alternatives, like enabling parents to turn content filters on their own computers to block kids from accessing inappropriate sites, were less effective.
Still, activists and many legislators continued to focus efforts on porn sites and other platforms they believed stood to bear the most harm to kids and teens, or expose them to the very things the local corner store would have barred them from accessing. Last year, the Supreme Court cracked open the door to some versions of this age verification on the internet. The court effectively decided that the now-vast and highly accessible open internet required the court to reconsider its earlier ruling and that “adults have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification.”
At the same time, efforts across many states to require age verification to access social media platforms have largely been blocked in the courts. It’s one thing to keep kids from accessing pornography, but it’s another to place hurdles in front of teens and adults trying to access a broad swath of speech. While courts generally recognize that minors don’t have a right to access porn, placing hurdles in front of both children and adults to access other legal speech creates serious constitutional challenges. While teens might encounter some content on social media sites that the state could have a compelling interest in shielding them from, they’re also likely to come across a lot more speech that is fully protected, making it trickier to impose age verification to access these content platforms. That’s led some advocates and policymakers to focus on a different kind of platform — one that may arguably be a closer equivalent to the local corner store.
App stores are the gateway to many of the platforms that users enjoy every day. While it’s possible to navigate to various websites from a mobile or desktop browser, most users choose to use apps for a richer and more streamlined experience on their favorite social media services and games.
That’s made the centralized nature of mobile app stores like Apple’s and Google’s attractive targets for age gating. Rather than play whack-a-mole with millions of apps, proponents of app store age verification laws see the marketplaces as ideal checkpoints. Plus, it would mean users would only have to send relevant age information to one or two companies one time, rather than to many companies with less-tested security protocols any time they wanted to download an app.
Parent advocates pushed for the first version of the law that passed in Utah, with similar versions later passed in Texas and Louisiana. But the method gained backing from Meta, Snap, and X — all developers who would benefit from age verification responsibility largely falling on Apple’s and Google’s app stores, rather than their own services. That could push more of the heat onto the app stores when young users come across harmful content or people on their own social platforms. While Apple has remained critical of the approach and fought against the laws, Google has taken a slightly different tactic, recently backing a separate method passed in California. Google said that the law, which Meta also supports, protects consumer privacy and recognizes keeping kids safe online is a “shared responsibility across the ecosystem.” The California model requires desktop or mobile operating systems to collect the age or date of birth of the account holder upon signup to share with the app store and relevant apps when they’re downloaded. But under other versions of the law, those who are really motivated could try to access some of the same sites through a browser, rather than a mobile app.
App store age verification bills have made it to the federal level, with two somewhat-competing proposals offered in a recent House package of kids online safety bills. One, the App Store Accountability Act, looks a lot like the similarly named laws in Utah, Texas, and Louisiana, requiring strict age verification. The other, the Parents Over Platforms Act, is endorsed by Google and Apple-backed group Chamber of Progress and would not require age verification, but rather for app stores to collect users’ ages when they create an account and transmit a signal about their age to developers.
House sponsors of both bills have indicated they’re open to working on the strategy together, but it’s still unclear how that would work when each takes a starkly different approach to things like whether companies should be mandated to verify users’ reported ages. And while kids online safety legislation in the House has moved quicker than expected once finally introduced late last year, Congress has mostly shown an inability to get these proposals across the finish line so far. Plus, the first legal test of the approach has reached a stumbling block, with a federal judge in Texas blocking the state’s version of the law that was set to take effect this month. It’s a fight that could eventually reach the Supreme Court.
But that doesn’t mean there won’t be any changes in the meantime. Apple, for example, seems to already see the writing on the wall with the groundswell of support for app store-based age verification methods. While its CEO has been lobbying directly against the proposals in the halls of Congress and even to the governor of Texas, Apple has also introduced a way for parents to set up kids’ accounts that let it share their kids’ age ranges with app developers.
While all of these laws are meant to block kids from sites with potentially harmful content, they will all impact the ways adults interface with the internet as well. In the next few years, we’ll find out if internet users in the US will still be able to roam the web with relatively few obstacles, or if verifying your age to download apps becomes as routine as flashing your ID to buy a beer.
- The US lags behind other countries that have enacted significant age restrictions on the internet, like Australia’s recent ban on social media accounts for kids under 16. That’s in part due to the First Amendment questions raised by age verification mandates in US law, but the shaky rollout of the UK’s age verification rules also provides a note of caution.
- There have been a couple high-profile cases of companies pulling out of states due to their age verification laws, like Pornhub in Texas and Bluesky in Mississippi. While that diminishes the amount of content available to users in those states (without a VPN), platforms may also adjust as age gating laws proliferate and potentially become more similar. Bluesky, for example, returned to Mississippi after it said it had upgraded its age assurance system in a way that would comply with the state’s age gating law and Australia’s social media ban.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
- ColumnClose
Column
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
FollowFollow
See All Column
- PolicyClose
Policy
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
FollowFollow
See All Policy
- The StepbackClose
The Stepback
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
FollowFollow
See All The Stepback
