💻 Tech: Get ready for age verification

TECH LOOKAHEAD

Get ready for age verification

Tech and Hill watch Korea trade talks

Jim Jordan is worried about apps

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Get ready for age verification

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If you thought age verification was just an issue for states, then you should keep an eye on Congress this fall.

Following a Supreme Court ruling in June, new rules in the U.K. and the attention of some lawmakers, outside advocates see Hill action accelerating soon, especially if the expected push on kids’ online issues takes off.

“There’s a very good chance that age verification ends up being part of that conversation and part of an eventual attempt at a kids’ online safety package,” said Luke Hogg, director of technology policy at the Foundation for American Innovation. Hogg briefed Hill staff on the issue last month.

Let’s break down some of the top policy ideas floating around and where the talks might stumble.

Across states. Age verification policy isn’t straightforward. There are a lot of different ideas about how it should be implemented.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. John James (R-Mich.) are pushing a bill to make Apple and Google verify ages on smartphones. For now, focusing on app stores is something that’s really only gaining ground in the states.

The bill would make Apple or Android phone users verify their ages, then link kids’ accounts to their parents’.

The idea is that parents would get more control over all of the apps their kids use, rather than having to check that each service is appropriate.

States are also experimenting with a range of age verification ideas. Florida, Ohio, Mississippi and others have passed laws that require age verification to access certain websites, like social media.

In the courts. A Big Tech trade group, NetChoice, has mostly succeeded in convincing courts that this approach, focused on a wide array of websites, is unconstitutional. NetChoice argued that these laws force adults to trade their sensitive information for access to content to which they have a constitutional right.

A recent loss for NetChoice on a Mississippi law could tee up these broader age-check measures for Supreme Court review.

Meanwhile, a Texas law that focused tightly on verifying ages for access to explicit sexual sites was upheld by the Supreme Court at the beginning of the summer. That’s content that’s already banned for kids, after all.

By validating the legality of at least one age-verification policy, the ruling kicked off chatter that more age verification proposals could be implemented.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) told us he’s also exploring the issue. Markey said there are “free speech issues on all sides,” but his staff is looking at various ideas.

Here’s more from Markey:

Challenges. The possibility of lawsuits — either from NetChoice, the free speech group that sued in Texas or someone else — will mean there are risks in trying to move forward as part of Markey’s “brand new era.”

Any bill proposing some form of age verification is also going to kick off a lot of lobbying.

And even if lawmakers are sure they’re coloring within the lines set by the Supreme Court, Congress will still have to figure out how to protect the data that’s used to verify kids’ ages.

After all, if stopping kids from seeing explicit content leads to hacks that expose birth certificates or parents’ credit card numbers, age-verification will be a dud.

“By mandating age verification, you have the government forcing essentially every online service to become a massive data collection agency,” said Amy Vos, director of state and federal affairs at NetChoice. “That creates a honey pot of information for bad actors.”

Then there’s the problem that kids, teens and adults alike simply may not put up with age verification. As we told you back in March, that’s one of the reasons the issue hasn’t gotten further in the Senate.

The U.K., for instance, recently rolled out age-check requirements aimed at stopping kids from seeing sexual content and a few extreme kinds of posts (like those related to suicide). The law is also supposed to limit the spread of hateful or violent content.

The result has been that VPN usage is way up, and access to basic social media has gotten complicated. Even some U.S. advocates of age verification see the U.K. rules as a model to avoid.

In other words, like any idea on the Hill, a brand new era may actually be just the first step.

— Ben Brody

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TRADING UP

Tech and Hill watch Korea trade talks

Big Tech and Republican lawmakers are keeping a close eye as U.S. and Korean officials meet this month to build on a trade framework announced at the end of July.

The dynamic will be familiar if you’ve read our coverage of Canadian or European trade talks: President Donald Trump announces a few high-level points of theoretical agreement on Truth Social.

Then, despite the claim there’s a nearly complete deal, the industry scrambles to find out if it’s actually getting what it wants. Companies also project confidence that the administration is aligned with them on using the talks to dismantle international policy that tech views as a trade barrier.

The next meeting with officials from Seoul is expected to take place later this month. There, Big Tech wants the U.S. to push back hard on a proposal to boost the scrutiny of digital giants by Korea’s equivalent of the Federal Trade Commission.

There’s a lot of concern among the GOP in Congress that the scrutiny will focus on U.S. firms.

Here’s a statement to us from Rep. Adrian Smith (R-Neb.), who chairs the trade subcommittee, on the upcoming sitdown:

Smith has been leading the charge on the Hill against the proposal, which is a cornerstone of new Korean President Lee Jae-myung’s agenda.

In July, Smith and Rep. Carol Miller (R-W.Va.) led a letter with more than 40 Republican House members saying the proposal for the Korean Fair Trade Commission “disproportionately targets U.S. digital companies for heightened regulatory requirements.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, also asked the head of the KFTC in a July letter for a briefing “on the KFTC’s current approach to competition enforcement, proposed reforms, and how those reforms might affect American companies.”

What they want. Tami Overby, a partner at the DGA Group who works with tech firms worried about the KFTC legislation, said her clients would like to see changes to the investigative tactics that Seoul’s competition enforcer uses.

In general, those can include moves like dawn raids or, in the digital competition proposal, the idea to halt tech companies’ work at the beginning of a probe.

“What they’d like to see is clearer procedures and processes from the KFTC, and maybe some adjustments to those procedures and due process [rights] that are more towards world-class, rather than Korea-unique,” Overby said.

Overby added if the trade talks drag on too long, the KFTC proposal may gain steam.

“I have real concern that this could go south quickly in South Korea if President Trump doesn’t make it a priority,” Overby said.

— Ben Brody

JOURNEYS AND JURISDICTION

Jim Jordan is worried about apps

The House Judiciary Committee is worried Apple and Google can’t protect apps’ brands and intellectual property — and the concern is part of Chair Jim Jordan‘s (R-Ohio) efforts to scrutinize foreign tech laws.

Here’s how it all works. Protection for IP is a perennial complaint by app makers, but European competition rules for Big Tech have supercharged the issue. The EU rules push Apple and Google to allow competing app stores onto their devices. In turn, those rival stores give phone users access to a broader range of apps, which may be less curated.

More apps can mean more choice but also more fakes and infringers.

“We are concerned that EU regulations will make it easier to steal IP and make it harder for American companies to protect their IP,” Russell Dye, spokesperson for Judiciary Republicans, told us.

The IP issue arose in part because European apps belonging to the App Association met with members of the Judiciary Committee in Brussels during a CODEL last month. The group’s president, Morgan Reed, told us that anxiety about IP in the EU was one of the main topics his members discussed with the U.S. lawmakers.

“You’ll have phony app stores that basically are created for the sole purpose of doing phishing,” Reed said. “That costs our members money, but most importantly, it costs them trust.”

At home and abroad. Right now, Apple and Google don’t have much incentive to expand their existing rules in a way that could be seen as meddling in IP disputes between apps. The Big Tech firms have to follow the law when competition enforcers and judges try to loosen their handling of apps.

Short of true malware, or straight-up stealing of trademarks, it can also be hard to know which apps’ complaints about stolen brands have merit.

Intellectual property and U.S.-based app stores are issues right in the wheelhouse of the Judiciary Committee, though.

But Judiciary Repulicans also want to influence policies beyond the committee’s remit that may affect American companies.

The Judiciary Committee released a report tied to the CODEL, for instance, that railed against “censorship” resulting from European content rules for social media.

Meanwhile, Jordan, in a letter to the Korean Fair Trade Commission, also said he’s conducting “oversight of how and to what extent foreign laws are being used to discriminate against innovative American companies and insulate their non-U.S. rivals from competition.”

— Ben Brody and Anthony Cruz

… AND THERE’S MORE

Downtown download

The summer doldrums can’t slow down tech lobbying, though it can shake up the personnel.

Here’s the latest from the filings:

– Divergent Technologies, which described itself as being in “​[n]ext-generation digital manufacturing,” hired Jason Miller, the longtime Trump campaign adviser and spokesperson.

Miller, through his firm SWH Partners, will be working on appropriations and promoting the “Civil Reserve Manufacturing Network” — commercial manufacturing capabilities that House defense appropriators like because they can quickly pivot to making weapons in the event of war.

– C3.ai brought on Zero Mile Strategies. Christopher Vieson, previously a top aide to former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, will lobby for the company. He’ll focus on “AI in defense software.”

– Shein Technology, the Chinese online fashion vendor, is no longer working with the Trump-allied mega-lobbyists at Ballard Partners.

– The Wi-Fi Alliance is no longer working with ML Strategies. The lobbyists had been focused on unlicensed spectrum. That issue was big for reconciliation.

— Ben Brody

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