- The era of the “wild west” internet is ending, but we must choose our next steps carefully, writes Merle Flowers.
State legislatures—including Texas, Utah, and Louisiana—have already enacted sweeping online government ID check mandates, creating a fragmented regulatory patchwork that ensures age assurance on the internet is here to stay.
The question is no longer if we need age assurance, but how to implement it effectively without breaking the internet or sacrificing privacy. Unfortunately, the most talked about federal proposal to date, the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA), offers a flawed solution that is riddled with loopholes and imposes draconian requirements that treat every educational game and calculator app as if it were an adult-only experience.
Fortunately, a much better alternative has emerged: H.R. 6333, the Parents Over Platforms Act (POPA) recently introduced by Reps. Auchincloss (D-MA) and Houchin (R-IN).
The fundamental flaw of the ASAA is that it attempts to apply a one-size-fits-all “adult app” standard to the entire mobile ecosystem. The bill would require app stores to conduct intrusive age verification on all users, demanding government IDs or birth certificates to distinguish between a 12-year-old and a 13-year-old. While such strict age verification is appropriate for age-restricted services like gambling or pornography, the ASAA mandates it for everything.
Under ASAA, users would have to turn over their government ID just to have an app store account and app stores would be forced to share a user’s age category and parental consent status with essentially any app developer upon request—meaning even low-risk apps like your local library app would receive sensitive data about children.
By treating every download like a high-risk transaction, the ASAA creates “consent fatigue,” where parents are bombarded with approval requests for harmless apps, leading them to mindlessly approve requests and miss actual dangers.
Furthermore, the ASAA provides a false sense of security because it is riddled with loopholes. It focuses narrowly on the app store “front door” but ignores the many other ways children access content. The bill fails to address how children can bypass safeguards through web browsers, sideloading (installing apps from outside the store), or pre-loaded apps. A child denied an app can simply open a browser and access the same harmful content via the web version, completely circumventing the ASAA’s protections. It also has carve outs for app stores for VR headsets, gaming consoles, and smaller app stores.
We need a federal standard that reflects the reality of the digital age. The Parents Over Platforms Act (POPA) is the preferred, welcome approach because it establishes a model of shared responsibility.
Unlike the ASAA, POPA sensibly focuses its regulations only on apps that provide different experiences for adults and minors or are intended solely for adults. This targeted, risk-based approach ensures that developers of high-risk social media apps are held fully accountable, while small businesses building harmless tools—like pig farming software or ed tech—are not crushed by compliance costs estimated at $80,000 in the first year alone.
Further, POPA closes the loopholes left open by ASAA. POPA mandates that developers use age signals to gate high-risk in-app communication features and restrict access to inappropriate content within the app itself. Critically, POPA extends these requirements to apps that are available on a web browser, ensuring that safety travels with the user whether they are on an app or a browser.
Finally, POPA is a privacy-respecting solution. It prohibits the use of children’s data to target ads and bans developers from using age signals to “back into” a user’s date of birth. It replaces the endless stream of consent requests with a centralized dashboard where parents can manage controls across apps in one place.
The era of the “wild west” internet is ending, but we must choose our next steps carefully. We should not embrace a law like the ASAA that exposes children’s data to millions of apps and leaves the back door open via the web. Instead, we should support the Parents Over Platforms Act, which delivers the continuous, loophole-free, and privacy-first protection American families deserve.
