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Washington, D.C., is still digging out after a major snowstorm that left the streets covered in "snowcrete" and turned every trip downtown into an off-roading adventure. Although by all accounts the sidewalks on Capitol Hill are some of the most passable in the city, inside the halls of Congress the picture is quite different. Like the cars on my street, most hints of bipartisan legislation are effectively mired in ice up to the wheel wells.
While both chambers focus top-level attention on negotiating a new funding package for the Department of Homeland Security, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce is working on its own intractable challenges. Moving the package of youth privacy and safety bills remains the top priority for the committee, delaying other action — like a long-awaited comprehensive consumer privacy bill — until the bills have cleared the committee.
Despite a lot of bipartisan alignment on guardrails for young people online, the lack of any public movement on the bill package signals a logjam among negotiators on the committee. Even after the high-profile fallout over the Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act, the committee's package includes at least eight bipartisan sponsored bills.
Broad preemption has certainly been a sticking point, but other debates are simmering under the surface. Committee ranking member Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., listed preemption standards as his top concern with the current bill package in his opening remarks at the last hearing, saying it was inappropriate that "these bills put a ceiling on kids' privacy and safety by stopping states from doing more to protect kids."
Pallone's general concerns with the package also included its emphasis on parental control and the tradeoff for privacy that age assurance requirements raise. On the first point he said, "Parents play an important role in keeping kids safe online, but platforms cannot hide behind parental tools to avoid making their underlying products safer. Moreover, for kids in unsupportive, neglectful, or even abusive households, there can be real world harms from allowing parents complete access and control over their teens' existence online." After all, most of the bills include teens up to 16 within the covered ages.
On the latter issue, Pallone expressed concerns "about bills that mandate third-party access to children's data or require an adult or kid to provide additional sensitive data like a government ID or biometrics before they can access content, send a message, or download an app." Age assurance challenges don't neatly map onto party lines, as the recent U.S. Federal Trade Commission workshop made clear.
It is unclear how Democrats' concerns have evolved as talks have continued, but the lack of a scheduled hearing shows passing a bipartisan package remains more of a dream than a plan.
Meanwhile, the only bill in the package introduced as a solely Democrat-led bill is Pallone's "Don't Sell Kids' Data Act," which would effectively prohibit data brokers from processing any data of minors under 17. Such a redline ban likely faces major push-back from industry stakeholders.
Industry friction is coming for some of the Republican proposals as well. NetChoice reportedly sent a memo warning lawmakers that the App Store Accountability Act is a nonstarter and would face immediate constitutional challenges, despite tweaks in the language meant to avoid the fate that befell the similar law in Texas. Meanwhile, states are racing ahead with similar bills, most notably in Alabama.
In fact, almost every federal proposal in the package has numerous analogues at the state level, including an avalanche of chatbot bills that are dominating the legislative cycle. This urgency of state legislative action on emerging tech issues, especially when applied to young people, is echoing in the halls of Congress. But will it be enough to urge compromise?
Bipartisanship is a fading art these days. In the coming weeks we will see if youth privacy and safety legislation is the exception that proves this rule or is another indicator of just how frozen Washington has become.
Please send feedback, updates and snow removal tips to cobun@iapp.org.
Cobun Zweifel-Keegan, CIPP/US, CIPM, is the managing director, Washington, D.C., for the IAPP.
This article originally appeared in The Daily Dashboard and U.S. Privacy Digest, free weekly IAPP newsletters. Subscriptions to this and other IAPP newsletters can be found here.
