OPINION:
Parents across America agree on something fundamental: They should decide what their children download, purchase and use on a smartphone. State legislatures, red and blue alike, are increasingly in agreement.
In 2024, New York enacted legislation requiring social media companies to use age estimation and obtain parental consent before serving algorithmically driven feeds to minors. California has adopted age-assurance requirements for digital services and enacted a separate law requiring parental consent before minors can access certain addictive social media features.
They share a common premise: Children should not be navigating binding digital ecosystems without parental oversight.
That same principle animates the App Store Accountability Act, a law now before Congress and already enacted in four states. The law requires the largest app store providers to verify age and obtain parental consent before minors download apps or make in-app purchases.
When it comes to a vote, the App Store Accountability Act is repeatedly met by overwhelming bipartisan margins. In Utah, 25 of 29 senators and 64 of 75 representatives voted in favor. In Texas, the vote was 30 of 31 senators and 120 of 129 representatives. In Louisiana and Alabama, the legislation passed unanimously.
This bipartisan support is not an accident. It reflects the straightforward legal and economic logic of the proposal.
At its core, the App Store Accountability Act rests on a simple principle: Trillion-dollar corporations should not be entering into binding commercial relationships with minors.
Every time a child clicks “download” in an app store, uses an app, clicks past a privacy policy, or purchases digital goods, that child is entering into a contractual relationship not only with Apple or Google but also often with third-party developers.
States have long regulated contracts involving minors. In Texas, a parent or guardian may veto a minor’s authority to control funds in a bank account. In Utah, individuals younger than 18 cannot sign a loan contract independently; parental consent or a cosigner is required.
In California and New York, minors generally lack the legal capacity to enter binding contracts. These rules are not controversial. They reflect centuries of contract law recognizing that minors require additional protection in commercial transactions. It is not to restrict but rather to protect.
Yet digital storefronts and app developers claim they are uniquely exempt from those principles simply because transactions occur on a screen rather than at a counter. They are wrong.
Especially because app stores are not passive environments filled with appropriately rated apps. Take Grok, for example, or a whole slew of new “nudifying” apps. Until recently, Grok was listed at 13+, until it became public that it was allowing users to generate child sexual abuse material and undress classmates and co-workers.
Only then did the age recommendation move to 16+. Apple, however, did not remove it from the App Store, despite Grok’s clear violation of Apple’s guidelines and policies. This is just one example of why its App Store, in its current form, is incapable of protecting children and curating their experiences properly.
Frankly, the structure of the mobile marketplace makes app stores the logical locus for this responsibility. Apple and Google control the overwhelming majority of smartphone app distribution. Parents should not have to navigate and re-navigate permissions across hundreds of individual apps. A one-time framework at the distribution layer creates a workable solution: Parents establish parameters once, and the ecosystem’s gatekeepers must honor them.
To be clear, this is not speech regulation. It is commercial regulation at the point of sale. States that have adopted the App Store Accountability Act did not do so lightly. Lawmakers held hearings. They evaluated alternatives. They weighed their options and the cost of maintaining the status quo. They concluded that age verification and parental consent at the app store level are the most practical, enforceable and scalable solutions.
It does not absolve social media companies from reforming themselves. In fact, in addition to the App Store Accountability Act, we will need social media reform to ensure that a child’s experience is safe from start to finish.
Courts traditionally respect such legislative judgments, particularly when regulating commercial transactions involving minors. The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized that statutes should be upheld if fairly possible and that judges should not lightly second-guess legislative determinations in areas involving new technologies and complex policy trade-offs.
As former Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer once noted, legislatures operate within real-world constraints — budgetary, technological and administrative — that courts are not required to manage.
That broader constitutional posture matters here. When bipartisan legislatures across multiple states — including California, New York, Utah and Texas — converge on the same principles, it underscores that this is not ideological experimentation. It is mainstream consumer protection adapted to a digital marketplace.
The larger national picture is clear: Protecting children online through age verification and parental consent is not a partisan project. Blue states and red states alike have concluded that parents, not platforms, should oversee minors’ access to digital marketplaces and algorithmically driven systems.
Congress should take note. A federal App Store Accountability Act would establish uniform rules nationwide, ensuring clarity for companies and consistency for parents. It would recognize a basic truth: Parents should set boundaries on what their children can and cannot access on a screen.
On this issue, the states have spoken, and they have spoken together. Washington should listen.
App Store age verification and parental consent can go a long way toward quelling the concerns we see in the mobile context, but more is, of course, needed, such as more direct regulations on social media’s addictive algorithms.
• Joel Thayer is president of the Digital Progress Institute. Sarah Gardner is the founder and CEO of the Heat Initiative.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.