Oppose the Kids Online Safety Act and Related Internet Regulation Package

I urge you to oppose the Kids Online Safety Act and the 19-bill internet regulation package being considered by the House Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on commerce this Tuesday. While these bills are presented as child protection measures, they represent a dangerous expansion of government control over online speech that will harm the very people they claim to protect. The revised House version of KOSA may have removed the duty of care provision, but it still requires platforms to maintain policies addressing vaguely defined categories of harm including threats of physical violence and content related to drugs, alcohol, and gambling. This creates a powerful incentive for platforms to over-censor legal speech to avoid liability. Resources for addiction recovery, harm reduction information, and support communities for vulnerable teens will disappear as platforms adopt the safest legal position by removing anything remotely controversial. The accompanying bills compound these problems. COPPA 2.0 raises privacy protections to age 17, which sounds reasonable until you consider the surveillance infrastructure required to verify ages across the internet. The RESET Act discussion draft would prohibit anyone under 16 from maintaining social media accounts, effectively creating a two-tiered internet where young people are excluded from digital civic life. The App Store Accountability Act mandates age verification at the app store level, normalizing constant identity verification for internet access. These measures will not stop determined bad actors but will create massive barriers to accessing legal information and communities. LGBTQ youth seeking support, teens researching mental health resources, and young people organizing around issues they care about will find themselves locked out or surveilled. The Senate passed its version 91-3 last year, but that broad support should concern us rather than reassure us. Bipartisan consensus often masks legislation that serves institutional interests over individual rights. I ask you to oppose this package and instead focus on enforcing existing laws against actual crimes like exploitation and fraud without building new censorship and surveillance infrastructure.