There is legislation moving through Congress that will change the way that everybody uses the Internet. On June 29, the House of Representatives passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act, H.R. 7757. This includes new rules from the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which requires online platforms to adopt default safeguards for minors, and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0), which would expand federal privacy protections for minors. In early August, the Senate Commerce Committee passed the KOSA bill and sent it to the full Senate for a vote. Even if the Senate version passes, it is different than the House bill. Legal critics say there are some flaws with the House bill language that should be corrected during a reconciliation process.

There are a lot of good arguments for the legislation. Research has shown that access to social media has led to cyberbullying and other activities that are creating anxiety and depression in young people. There is also a lot of evidence that being online can lead to compulsive behavior like infinite scrolling and addictive notification loops. The law also wants to protect young people from exploitation.

Much of the rest of the world is coming to this same realization, and a lot of other countries have passed or are considering similar legislation. France enacted a law that bars children under 15 from creating new social media accounts and requires full compliance for existing accounts. The UK has announced legislation looking to block children under 16 from major social media platforms. Canadian legislators have proposed the Safe Social Media Act to restrict users under 16 and mandate strict age verification. Austria is working on a bill aimed at restricting social media access for children under 14 along with other digital literacy school reforms. Denmark announced plans to implement a national social media age floor for children under 15.

The reason I say this will change the Internet is that there is no way to implement this kind of regulation without requiring everybody on the Internet to verify their age. There are several downsides to an Internet that requires age verification. One is that this won’t just apply to social media. I have to think this is going to apply to newspapers, magazines, blogs, and a lot of other content.

The only way to verify age is to upload verifiable personal data. Some age verification processes ask for things like a copy of a government ID. Others use biometric scans that use an algorithm to guess a user’s age based on facial images or online behavior. The problem with creating age verification profiles is that they can be hacked, meaning unknown parties can use that data to pretend to be you. There are already known cases of such hacking. In 2024, the company AU10TIX was hacked. The company did age verification for various online platforms. The hackers got access to information including name, date of birth, nationality, identification number, and images of documents like drivers’ licenses. I can’t imagine that I will ever be willing to upload a picture of my driver’s license or social security number to any website.

Another issue is the lack of privacy, because this probably means that social media platforms will know the identity of everybody who visits them. The law will force them to know who you are to prove they are complying with the law.

The laws have other downsides that are a huge problem for online platforms. They will require online platforms to shield children from “dangerous” content. First, that makes each platform have to decide what is dangerous. Their attorneys are likely to advise them to block a huge amount of things that might be construed as dangerous. This probably will lead to a further dumbing down of web content. More dangerous is that governments can define what’s dangerous, which could mean being forced to block political and social information a government doesn’t like.

It seems inevitable that this is going to become a law since there were 76 sponsors of the legislation in the Senate. Any final legislation will be challenged in the Courts, which could take a while. But sometime in the next few years, this will become the law. While implementing this will be a challenge for social media companies, in the long run, this will significantly improve their ability to track people who use their site.