R Street Testimony in Opposition to NH HB 1658, App Store Age Verification Requirements
Testimony from:
Josh Withrow, Fellow, Tech & Innovation Policy, R Street Institute
In OPPOSITION to House Bill 1658, the “An Act relative to parental consent and age verification for digital application platforms.”
January 29, 2025
House Committee on Commerce & Consumer Affairs
Chairman Hunt and members of the committee,
My name is Josh Withrow, and I am a resident fellow with the Technology and Innovation Policy team at the R Street Institute, which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, public policy organization. Our mission at RSI is to engage in research and outreach to promote free markets and limited, effective government in many areas, including the technology and innovation sector.
I am writing to you today on behalf of the R Street Institute in opposition to House Bill 1658. While we share the goal of protecting kids and teens from harmful content and other dangers online, we believe that mandatory age verification at the app store level poses several practical and constitutional concerns.[1] These issues outweigh whatever limited good this proposal may achieve.
No matter how the law is enforced, New Hampshire residents would be forced to hand over a great deal of sensitive personal data, including potentially government IDs, to Google and Apple merely in order to be able to download apps to their mobile devices. It would be impossible for app stores to implement the level of age verification required by HB 1658 without collecting more data on all of their users than they do presently, and even the best age estimation services commercially available have error rates that would force many users to produce further evidence such as a state ID in order to verify they are not a minor.[2] Verifying parental consent is even harder to do without resorting to documentary identification.[3]
Rather than empowering parents to protect their children from harmful content online, HB 1658 would compromise their privacy and force them to respond to permission requests for any app download regardless of whether age restriction is merited, be it a social media app or a calculator. Depending upon how the statute is enforced, requiring developers to obtain parental consent each time they implement “a significant change to the app” is both burdensome to the developers and likely to flood parent accounts with an obnoxious number of notifications.[4] And from a practical standpoint, age-gating the app stores will not even keep kids and teens safe from most online harms – they can, for example, simply use their mobile device’s web browser.
Increasingly, the major online platform owners are investing heavily to make their parental control tools at the device, browser, and platform levels more accessible and effective.[5] In addition, there has long been a robust market for third-party software that grants parents even more granular control over their children’s mobile device screen time and online access.[6] Given the widespread availability of better private solutions to online safety, we believe that educational efforts aimed at providing both kids and parents with the knowledge of how to more safely navigate the digital world would be a better approach.
For example, states such as Tennessee have passed legislation that directs public schools to include education about online safety in their curriculum.[7] Information resources such as the Federal Trade Commission’s “Protecting Kids Online” campaign are another way that states can help empower parents to understand the tools freely available to them to keep their kids safe online.[8]
In addition, the fact that every mobile device user would have to go through the age verification process to use the app stores almost certainly dooms this bill on constitutional grounds. Previous attempts to enact broad age-gating restrictions for online services have consistently been found to violate the First Amendment. In the 1990s, the majority of the Communications Decency Act was struck down, with the U.S. Supreme Court finding unanimously that the law’s “burden on adult speech is unacceptable if less restrictive alternatives would be at least as effective in achieving the Act’s legitimate purposes.”[9] Given the widespread ability of parental tools and guidance on how to use them, HB 1658 would likely fail this least-restrictive-means test – a conclusion reinforced by the recent district court decision that enjoined Texas’s similar App Store Accountability Act.[10]
Lawmakers would be better off focusing on ways to improve online literacy, both for parents and their children, and encouraging parents to exercise the substantial power they already have to control what content and interactions their kids can access online. For these reasons, we urge you to oppose HB 1658.
Thank you for your time,
Josh Withrow
Fellow, Technology & Innovation Policy
R Street Institute
jwithrow@rstreet.org
[1] For a broad overview of problems with app store age verification proposals, see: Shoshana Weissmann and Josh Withrow, “No, conscripting the app stores doesn’t solve the problems with age verification,” R Street Institute, Jan 29, 2025. https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/no-conscripting-the-app-stores-doesnt-solve-the-problems-with-age-verification/.
[2] On error rates for the best age estimation technologies, see: Kayee Hanaoka, et al., “Face Analysis Technology Evaluation: Age Estimation and Verification,” NIST Internal Report 8525, May 2024. https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2024/NIST.IR.8525.pdf.
[3] The State of Play: Is Verifiable Parental Consent Fit for Purpose?” Future of Privacy Forum, June 2023. https://fpf.org/verifiable-parental-consent-the-state-of-play/.
[4] HB 1658, General Court of New Hampshire, 2026 Legislative Session. https://gc.nh.gov/bill_status/billinfo.aspx?id=2217&inflect=2
[5] See, “Helping Protect Kids Online,” Apple.com, Feb. 2025. https://developer.apple.com/support/downloads/Helping-Protect-Kids-Online-2025.pdf, “Leading Technology Companies and Foundations Back New Initiative to Provide Free, Open-Source Tools for a Safer Internet in the AI Era,” PR Newswire, Feb. 10, 2025. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/leading-technology-companies-and-foundations-back-new-initiative-to-provide-free-open-source-tools-for-a-safer-internet-in-the-ai-era-302371243.html.
[6] “Children Online Safety Tools,” Competitive Enterprise Institute, Last accessed Feb. 16, 2025. https://cei.org/children-online-safety-tools/.
[7] HB 0285, Tennessee General Assembly, 2025 Legislative Session. https://wapp.capitol.tn.gov/apps/BillInfo/default.aspx?BillNumber=HB0825&GA=114.
[8] “How to Use Parental Controls to Keep Your Kid Safer Online”, Federal Trade Commission, April 2025. https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-use-parental-controls-keep-your-kid-safer-online.
[9] Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997), U.S. Supreme Court, June 26, 1997. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/521/844.
[10] CCIA v. Paxton, case n. 1:25-CV-1660-RP (United States District Court Western District of Texas, Austin Division, filed December 23, 2025), https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txwd.1172869998/gov.uscourts.txwd.1172869998.65.0.pdf.