A year ago, lawmakers were trying to use the closing months of the 118th Congress to pass a variety of protections for online consumers.
Now, members of Congress are seeing if they can pick up the pieces of all those failed efforts and put together legislation that can become law.
There are efforts to protect kids on social media, address privacy concerns and improve data protection for teens, along with new ideas that lawmakers weren’t even considering in 2024.
Here’s where lawmakers stand as they look to advance online consumer measures this fall — plus, what they’re up against.
KOSA. The Kids Online Safety Act would limit certain social media design features like autoscroll in a bid to protect kids and teens. The popular bill sailed through the Senate last year. But House Republican leaders killed it over worries that the bill was a Trojan horse for censorship against conservatives.
Now, KOSA is working its way back. The lead House Republican on the measure, Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.), told us recently he has a new version ready for feedback.
Bilirakis and, more importantly, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) said they want a bipartisan product, like the version of KOSA that passed the Senate last year.
That will be tough to achieve. The price for House GOP leadership’s support will likely be striking legal liability protections for tech firms from the bill. But Democrats are sure to push to keep that provision in the bill to secure their side’s support for the proposal.
Meanwhile, senators who have championed KOSA have little interest in the changes House Republicans are discussing. They said Congress should enact the version of the bill that passed the Senate last year on a 91 to 3 vote.
Kids and App Stores. A new policy push this year would require phones, laptops and other devices to verify users’ ages as a part of an effort to block kids from mature apps or websites.
We’ve reported that Guthrie’s panel is considering including the proposal among a set of digital consumer protections he could bring forward in the next few months.
This issue has gotten some momentum in recent days with the California legislature putting a hardware-level age-verification bill on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk. Similar laws have sprung up in other states. So has a congressional version that focuses on smartphones.
Several tech companies have gotten behind the California bill or similar approaches. That includes big names like Google, Meta, Snap and Pinterest. Others in the industry, such as the Big Tech trade group NetChoice, have all but sworn to fight age verification laws.
Comprehensive privacy. For many lawmakers, one of the greatest disappointments of last year was another failure to pass online privacy protections for all users, not just kids and teens.
We’re not exactly bullish on the prospects of progress on this front this year, but we’d like to bring you some news on where things stand.
We’ve told you the Energy and Commerce panel’s Republican-only working group has started meeting at the member-level to hash out ideas for privacy legislation. Now we’ve found out what they’re talking about.
Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.), a member of the working group, said the first member-level meeting focused on what areas the federal government should take the lead on over states in enacting and enforcing laws.
Longtime privacy watchers will recognize preemption and enforcement as the two thorniest, most intractable issues year after year. Preemption, in the context of artificial intelligence, has also become controversial these past few months.
There’s also an effort on privacy in the Senate Judiciary Committee focused on intellectual property, though we’d call it very preliminary.
We’ll see if any of this can break through this Congress.
