A leading kids safety bill has been poison pilled, supporters say

Last year, the House of Representatives was the place where a leading kids online safety bill came to die. On Tuesday, a powerful House committee positioned itself as the place where that bill could be resurrected… along with 18 other proposals.

During a three-hour hearing, an Energy and Commerce subcommittee discussed 19 bills recently packaged together in an effort to make the internet safer for kids. They include a mix of official and draft legislation, including a reworked version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) — the Senate bill that was denied a vote in the House last year after passing 91-3 in the upper chamber — and the App Store Accountability Act, which would federalize an age verification model that’s taken hold in several states.

But so far, the compromise solution lawmakers came up with seems to satisfy no one. KOSA was introduced without its signature element, a “duty of care” for tech platforms to avoid contributing to certain mental health disorders. It added a more expansive preemption standard that bars states from enacting or enforcing any law that relates to the same provisions as the federal bill. And the bills that joined KOSA — particularly the App Store Accountability Act — could prove just as controversial as it has been.

The fiercest advocates for the Senate’s version of KOSA called the House version a “Poison-Pill” and “non-starter.” Longtime opponents are tepidly glad for the changes, but worry about the replacement language and the new focus on age verification, which poses privacy and surveillance concerns. Everyone seems to be mad at the (already dwindling) prospect of the bills being reportedly lumped together with preemption of state AI regulations, and the rushed package release left both sides with little time to digest the 19 bills the committee dropped just before jetting off for Thanksgiving.

At the start of the hearing, the committee’s House leaders tried to explain their revisions. Without the changes, they said, KOSA could be blocked in court for violating the First Amendment, a fate that’s befallen similar state laws. “A law that gets struck down protects no one,” E&C Chair Brett Guthrie (R-KY) said, echoing insistence from commerce subcommittee chair and KOSA co-sponsor Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) not to “mistake durability for weakness.”

But that was little comfort to many original KOSA supporters in the room, including parents who lost kids after encountering online harms. Deb Schmill, whose teen daughter Becca died from fentanyl poisoning after obtaining drugs with the help of a social media platform, told The Verge she doesn’t buy the representatives’ explanation, but blames House leadership for putting the panel leaders in a “difficult situation.”

Part of the problem is simply intense disagreements over how to protect kids on the internet. Supporters of KOSA, for example, believe that placing the responsibility on tech platforms not to surface content to kids that will encourage eating disorders or stoke depression could save lives. But critics, ranging from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to LGBTQ+ and privacy advocates, have expressed concern that partisan enforcers could weaponize language meant to shield kids from harm to chill legal speech, and could end up stifling resources meant to mitigate the same harms targeted in the bill.

But even besides the gutting of the duty of care, KOSA supporters were most upset by its beefed up preemption clause they fear could stifle states’ abilities to craft additional protections at a time when technology is rapidly advancing. “Passing this shell of a bill is worse than inaction,” Haley McNamara, executive director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), said in a statement. “All current state online child protection laws are in jeopardy.” ParentsSOS, a coalition of 20 families who lost kids to online harms, vowed to “vocally oppose the package” if it includes a weakened version of KOSA that preempts “good state laws.”

The hearing focused significantly on multiple proposals to require app stores to verify users’ ages, which in some cases appear to directly contradict one another. While the App Store Accountability Act requires app store operators to verify users’ ages using methods beyond self-reported birth dates, a discussion draft of the Parents Over Platforms Act, for example, lets users simply enter their age when signing up for the store, a method that more closely tracks an alternative model recently passed in California.

Rep. John James (R-MI), the House sponsor of the App Store Accountability Act, told The Verge after the hearing that it was an “and both, rather than an either or approach,” when it came to the two bills, and said “bipartisanship” was the element he’d like to add to his bill.

Lawmakers seem to see app store-level age verification as an elegant solution that doesn’t require hundreds of apps to directly solicit sensitive information from users. But critics worry some versions of the legislation will require users to disclose more data and potentially chill speech. And though some KOSA advocates like the idea, they generally don’t see it as sufficient on its own.

Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL), who co-sponsored the prior House version of KOSA that included the duty of care, told The Verge that while it’s good to have several tools to tackle the issue, age verification bills may not be as immediately impactful as a strong version of KOSA. “I don’t think that age verification technology is as well-vetted,” she said. “What we do have though is in KOSA, a duty of care that would apply to the tech company’s responsibility to design their products with an eye towards the well-being of kids.”

KOSA’s opponents share some of the same concerns. “Everyone on every side of KOSA, of age verification, of these issues in general have a shared frustration in what tech companies are able to do to us every day,” said Sarah Philips, a campaigner at Fight for the Future — which supports solutions like antitrust regulation and comprehensive privacy protections over playing “whack-a-mole” with content and algorithms. “The question is the approach.” At the hearing, Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL) expressed frustration that her proposal to inject more app store competition by forcing large platform operators to let users set different default stores was not included in the package.

The House is only in session for 10 more days until members go home for the holiday break, and when they return, bipartisan wins could get harder to notch as the 2026 midterms creep up. Bilirakis told The Verge that as far as he was aware, the bills would not be included in the year-end defense bill. He said a markup of the kids package, where committee members would vote on advancing the bills, likely wouldn’t happen until next year.

Even if the House managed to pass its versions of the bills, there would undoubtedly be a fight in the Senate. Senate authors for KOSA and COPPA 2.0 have already expressed their disappointment at what they see as weakened versions.

“I am just frustrated that Congress is giving all of us crumbs, rather than actually doing what needs to be done,” Philips said, “and honestly, doing what needed to be done 20 years ago that might’ve prevented us from being in this situation we are right now.”