OPINION — Congress is ramping up action on online child-safety legislation. With two major age-verification bills recently marked up in subcommittee, lawmakers face an important choice about how to protect kids without overregulating the internet.
It’s critical that we keep kids safe online. But not all apps pose the same threat to kids. Some small software businesses, for instance, make apps that help people solve word puzzles and improve baseball skills. Benign apps, along with thousands of other educational, fitness and entertainment apps, clearly don’t warrant the same level of regulation that adult-oriented or risky social media apps do.
Smart online-safety legislation requires targeted rules that keep kids away from high-risk apps without overregulating harmless apps. That’s the approach taken by one of the bills under consideration, the Parents Over Platforms Act — POPA.
