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

Please oppose any legislation that mandates age verification for internet access or social media. These laws don't just restrict teenagers — they force every adult online to submit face scans, passports, or government IDs just to read a webpage or post a comment. That's a surveillance infrastructure built on the premise that everyone must prove their identity to speak. The global track record here is damning. Australia's under-16 social media ban — the world's first — is already blocking teenagers from accessing news. The UK's Online Safety Act has drawn sharp criticism for introducing more harm than it prevents. The EU's proposed age verification app raises serious tracking risks through long-term identifiers that follow users across the web. Every one of these systems creates vast databases of sensitive personal information that can be breached, sold, or handed to governments. Age-gating the internet is a privacy catastrophe dressed up as child protection. I want you to reject this approach and instead support targeted, evidence-based solutions that don't require stripping anonymity from the entire online public.