R Street Institute
Analysis

The KIDS Act Is Not All Right

by Josh Withrow
June 29, 2026
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issues: Data Policy, Online Content Policy, Technology and Innovation

Given the growing sense of urgency that Congress finally needs to do something to address the safety of children and teens online, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed a cobbled-together package of legislation dubbed the Kids and Internet Digital Safety (KIDS) Act. While this conglomeration contains some proposals that on their own would be praiseworthy, taken as a whole it represents a huge government overreach into online platform design that is likely to degrade platform usefulness and free speech for all internet users, while doing little to actually protect minors.

The KIDS Act is an omnibus bill that combines portions of nearly a dozen smaller bills. These include (among others) the:

To the credit of House Republicans who have been working on this bill for some time, the amended version of KOSA, which the R Street Institute has long opposed, omits its unworkable “duty of care” provision that would have forced platforms to take down a great deal of constitutionally protected speech. Unfortunately, the remainder of KOSA contains a mandate on platform design, requiring that covered sites default to whatever settings provide “the most protective level of control with respect to privacy and safety.” This would require sites to disable features like endless scrolling, personalized recommendations, autoplay, and direct messaging by default for anyone the platform “knows or should have known” is a minor.

This amended knowledge standard is a low bar for holding sites liable, and therefore many covered platforms will be confronted with the option of either: 1) implementing these safeguards for all users and thus making their platforms less useful by default, or 2) enacting some form of age verification in order to separate or exclude minors. Thus, the fact that the revised KOSA contains a clause clarifying that it does not require age verification is likely to be rendered moot by the realities of compliance.

Other components of the KIDS Act complicate this further. For example, revisions it contains to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) raise the age of minors protected under that long-standing law from 13 to 16, while making compliance with the law’s protections on data collection more confusing. As a letter by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) correctly inquires, “How does a site comply with a law that says not to collect personal information on specific ages of users without knowing anything about the age of its users?” The likely answer, they conclude, is that “litigation-averse companies are likely to implement some kind of age-verification process to avoid running afoul of the law.” The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has already pushed in this direction by issuing a policy statement that encourages companies to adopt age verification in return for less scrutiny by the FTC.

Meanwhile, the SAFE BOTS Act places similar pressure for artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot providers to use age verification to restrict access to their products. Similarly, under the GAMING Act, video game platforms would be forced to ban communications with other users by default for anyone they “know or should have known” to be a minor, incentivizing age verification for access to those services as well. Even if the FTC were to allow platforms to merely estimate, rather than truly verify, the age of their users, platforms which do not already collect enough data to make a solid estimate of the age of an individual user would be forced to do so, or skip straight to more intrusive verification methods like facial scans or documentary verification instead. 

Thus, in spite of the insistence, and perhaps the genuine intent of its supporters, the KIDS Act would still result in a radically different paradigm for access to the internet where age barriers to online speech and services are likely to become the norm.

The better portions of the KIDS Act are several study proposals that seeks to acquire data to help Congress make better informed decisions about how to improve youth safety online, such as the Safe Social Media Act, the Assessing Safety Tools for Parents and Minors Act, and the study on “chatbots and the mental health of minors.” The government can also play a role in empowering both parents and minors through educational materials and campaigns as proposed in the included Promoting a Safe Internet for Minors Act and the AI Resources for Education (AWARE) Act. Helping promote digital literacy and informed use of the internet and AI platforms is an excellent way to promote safety while respecting parental choice and the freedom of individuals to decide how they and their children participate in the digital ecosystem.

The tools that parents need to limit their children’s access to social media, AI chatbots, video games, and the internet in general already exist and are easy to access and use. A top-down government mandate to redesign all these products to duplicate online safety tools that the market has already provided would be an unnecessary, and likely unconstitutional, government intrusion into online free speech. Congress can salvage the portions of the KIDS Act that are consistent with these principles and scrap the rest.