1. United States
2. N.Y.
3. Letter

Vote against the KIDS Act. This omnibus bill bundles together provisions from KOSA, COPPA 2.0, the SCREEN Act, the SAFE BOTS Act, and others into a sweeping mandate that will degrade the internet for everyone while doing almost nothing to actually protect children. The core problem is compliance math. Requiring platforms to disable personalized recommendations, autoplay, direct messaging, and endless scrolling by default for any user they "know or should have known" is a minor creates one inevitable outcome: mass age verification. The bill even includes a clause claiming it doesn't require age verification, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation has flagged exactly this compliance trap in the COPPA 2.0 provisions. The FTC is already nudging companies toward age verification through its own policy statements. Platforms will verify ages, and every user's privacy pays the price. Parental tools to limit children's online access already exist and are straightforward to use. Congress doesn't need to redesign the entire internet to protect kids. The study and digital literacy components buried in this bill — the AWARE Act, the Safe Social Media Act, the Assessing Safety Tools for Parents and Minors Act — are worth keeping. Strip out the platform redesign mandates and pass those instead.