This week, House Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie announced a full committee markup of the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA) as part of a new kids’ online safety package. The bipartisan Parents Over Platforms Act (POPA) was omitted. After months of productive bipartisan talks, negotiations collapsed, and Committee Democrats say the Majority is “moving forward with a partisan package that lets Big Tech off the hook.” PPI shares that concern. Child safety legislation that passes committee on a party-line vote has no path in the Senate, and this approach risks squandering months of good-faith work on an issue where real agreement was within reach.
Our concerns with the ASAA go beyond process. The bill’s age verification mandates don’t just affect teens — they require every adult to hand over identity documents to download any app, whether it’s Instagram or a weather widget. The Majority keeps pointing to Apple Pay as proof that this is easy, but about one in five Americans don’t have a credit card, and setting up Apple Pay often requires a government ID upstream. The burden falls hardest on those who can least afford it. Advocacy groups have warned that identity-linked verification causes adults to self-censor and marginalized users to disengage. Requiring universal ID collection to use an app store also runs counter to basic data minimization principles — the bill collects far more personal information than is necessary to keep kids safe, and shares it with every developer regardless of whether their app poses any risk.
The bill also moves in the opposite direction from the FTC, which just issued an enforcement policy statement defining “age verification” to include age estimation and inference — privacy-preserving approaches that the ASAA ignores. At the same time, the latest bill text explicitly exempts third-party app stores, which happen to be the actual channel where users download adult content apps that Google Play and the App Store prohibit. And while the Majority has taken a hard line on the need for rigorous verification, the new version of the bill lets parents simply attest to their child’s age — an internal contradiction that undercuts the rationale for making every adult produce an ID in the first place.
We’d also note that the argument made by the ASAA’s supporters — that minors shouldn’t be entering into contracts with app stores — doesn’t hold up. Under U.S. common law, minors can enter into contracts, but those contracts are voidable in every state. Minors already have more contractual protection than adults do.
PPI continues to believe that POPA is the stronger bill. It’s bipartisan, introduced by Reps. Auchincloss (D-Mass.) and Houchin (R-Ind.), and supported by child safety advocates, small businesses, and industry stakeholders. It focuses verification on apps that actually provide different experiences for adults and minors, rather than treating every download the same. It gives parents real tools instead of burying them in consent requests they’ll eventually tune out. Our polling shows that 70% of parents want protections that keep working while their kids use apps, not a one-time check at download, and only a third think app store verification alone will keep kids safe. POPA was designed with those concerns in mind, and unlike the ASAA, whose state-level counterpart was blocked by a federal court as overbroad, it’s built on a legal foundation that can hold up.
Rep. Auchincloss has filed an amendment to Thursday’s markup that would strike the ASAA language and replace it with POPA. We urge the Committee to support that amendment and use it as the starting point for legislation that can actually get to the president’s desk. Kids and parents can’t wait for Congress to get this wrong twice.
