Once again, the opponents of online freedom are using the protection of children as a strawman argument to impose restrictions on digital content — this time, at the operating system level.

Age verification legislation proposals are spreading across multiple U.S. states like dandelions after a spring rain – and apparently inspiring federal legislation as well. Once again, the opponents of online freedom are using the protection of children as a strawman argument to impose restrictions on digital content – this time, at the operating system level. Unsurprisingly, these proposals are all deeply flawed and assume that all operating systems function the same way (they don’t). Even less surprising is where the funding and lobbyists for this effort actually come from.

You don’t have to be incredibly older than the children this nonsense allegedly protects to have a sense of deja vu in this. The same strawman arguments were made at the federal level in the Communications Decency Act (1996), the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (2000), and the Children’s Internet Protection Act (2000).

In all cases, the core objective of these laws have been to place providers of online services in the business of being nannies on behalf of parents either too busy, too indifferent, or too stupid to regulate their children’s consumption of digital content without assistance. 

But as children become increasingly more adept at using the Internet than their hapless parents, there is increasing anxiety on the part of those parents – and an increasing willingness to surrender digital privacy and autonomy in the name of child protection.

A willingness that is being exploited in the service of other interests.

At this writing, such laws are either in place or proposed in over thirty states – with additional states adding on a daily basis. One might assume this wave of legislation simply represents legislators responding to a legitimate (if misguided) interest in child protection on the part of their constituents. And this may be true to some extent. But what is also true is over seventy million dollars has been spent to date on lobbying efforts across 45 states advancing this case.

As documented on the TBOTE Project website, principal actors in this lobbying effort include the Heritage Foundation, Meta, and Twitter/X. Between 2024 and 2025, Meta’s combined direct spending on this effort exceeds fifty million dollars. For a company on trial for routinely exploiting children on its social media platforms to claim a fifty million dollar interest in protecting those same children seems just a little bit rich. 

But that’s just the start. The researcher behind this website traced out over two billion dollars in Meta’s overall lobbying effort via groups like the Digital Childhood Alliance.  Even for a company the size of Meta, that’s some serious money for something as simple and civic-minded as protecting children online.

Unless, of course, that’s not really the point in the first place.

The involvement of the Heritage Foundation somewhat gives the game away. The same people who think a photo ID should be a prerequisite for voting are all too happy to support legislation that forces you to provide personal information to a centralized database every time you access a computer or other Internet-connected device. This is where the interests of conservative think tanks and internet oligarchs completely align. It’s not about protecting your children, it’s about controlling them – and you.

But perhaps the worst aspect of these laws is not their consistent overreach into personal privacy, but their consistent ignorance of what, exactly, they are trying to regulate. Much as this entire debacle is fuelled in part by the willful ignorance of the parents of digitally connected children, potential abuses and failures of these laws will be a direct result of the technical ignorance of the law makers.

Let’s start with the potential failures. The California law, which serves somewhat as a model for most of them, targets digital device operating systems for enforcement with no clear definition of what such a thing is and no clear mechanism (other than fines) for enforcement. It clearly makes the assumption that all operating systems are the intellectual property of a company like Apple, and that all operating systems are connected to a software repository under that company’s control – in other words, something like the Apple App Store.

These assumptions rapidly break down, once one moves past iPhone/Android mobile devices and MacOS/Windows laptops and desktops. They completely fail in the case of Linux-based devices at any level, from hand-held to server, which are based on open-source community projects and have no single corporate ownership that can be targeted for fines. Applying age-verification restrictions to such devices rapidly becomes an exercise in absurdity.

But let’s just say, in the interest of ‘protecting children’, those restrictions get applied anyway. Given that the majority of Linux distributions are based on Ubuntu, which does have a single point of corporate ownership (Canonical), it would not be impossible to add age-verification code to a majority of open-source digital devices. That’s where the potential for abuse comes in.

The problem with pushing these restrictions into the world of open source software is that it is ‘open source’. Every single line of code that goes into every single operating system utility and user application used in Linux is freely available to anyone. This would mean that, assuming the same API and central identity management repository was used by all of these various age verification tools, anyone who wanted to reverse-engineer these tools as a means of targeting – not protecting – children in online environments would have the means to do precisely that.

Given that Linux-based personal digital devices account for less than 10% of the overall consumer market, the most likely outcome would be to carve out exceptions for open source software in these ill-advised laws. In terms of the actual agenda of controlling as much online activity as possible, 90% is certainly ‘good enough’. But that doesn’t close out the possibility of age-verification data abuse, it just delays it and makes it more difficult. When there’s ‘an app for that’… there eventually winds up being a hack as well.

The real solution would be parents doing their own parenting, instead of expecting various governmental agencies to do it for them. But that’s had a pretty poor track record so far. For the last twenty years, there has been a consistent pattern of kids picking up on technology faster than their parents, technology evolving so fast that even people who do tech for a living have an increasingly difficult time keeping up.

Another real solution might be treating massive online companies like Meta as public utilities and holding them accountable to acting in the public good – particularly when it comes to children. But that’s a rant – and a battle – for another day.

As earlier mentioned, the latest development in this unfolding story is the introduction of HR 8250, created and referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on April 13th. At this writing, virtually nothing is known about this proposed legislation other than it’s proposed purpose (‘To require operating system providers to verify the age of any user of an operating system, and for other purposes’) and it’s sponsor and co-sponsor: Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Elise Stephanik (R-NY). The former is a reliably normie Democrat, the latter is a reliably bat-shit crazy Republican. About the only thing they seem to have in common is that, per OpenSecrets.org, the top 2024 contributor to both turns out to be AIPAC.

Not, of course, that there is anything inherently nefarious (or surprising) about either a New York or New Jersey legislator receiving contributions from AIPAC. But it does contribute to an entirely reasonable question: who, exactly, is this legislation intended to benefit?