Child Safety Online Requires Real Accountability

As Congress considers new legislation on children’s online safety, lawmakers face a clear choice about where responsibility should fall. Protecting children online requires more than broad government mandates that undercuts parents’ ability to decide what is best for their children. It instead requires policies that respect parents’ vital role in raising their children and keeping them safe.

The App Store Accountability Act (ASAA) is one of those big government mandates however. The ASAA shifts responsibility away from the developers who design digital products and towards a one size fits all government fiat over app stores that do not control how individual services function. This structure limits parental choice, burdens families with unnecessary compliance over content like calculator apps or the weather app, and does little to improve real-world safety outcomes. It further would require the collection of troves of children’s data, potentially exposing children to bad actors online who will undoubtedly target the data.

Technology policy scholar Shane Tews recently made a similar point, noting that centralized age-gating at the app store or operating system level misplaces risk and creates a false sense of security. Safety depends on how individual products are built and how their features shape user behavior, not on who distributes them.

The Parents Over Platforms Act on the other hand, a bill Congress is also considering, reflects that reality. It places accountability on developers who control product design, preserves parents’ ability to evaluate individual apps, and avoids turning routine online activity into a nationwide data-collection exercise. It also offers regulatory clarity that allows innovation to continue without sacrificing family privacy or free expression.

Congress should not be creating expansive government mandates related kids online, creating a kids’ safety Obamacare that courts are likely to strike down and parents are unlikely and honestly should not trust. We instead need policies that strengthen families and put parents, not government bureaucrats, in charge of deciding what is best for their children.

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Ethan Friedman is a Junior at UNL and President of UNL College Republicans