A Deliberate Trade-Off
The House Energy and Commerce Committee's unveiling of the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act, H.R. 7757) on June 23, 2026 represents the most viable federal children's online safety bill in four years. But the legislation is notable as much for what it excludes as for what it contains. By dropping the 'duty of care' provision that defined the original Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), House leaders made a deliberate calculation: legal durability over maximum ambition.
What the KIDS Act Actually Does
The compromise bundles KOSA's surviving provisions with over a dozen child safety bills into a single package:
- Age verification for pornography — platforms where more than one-third of content qualifies as 'sexual material harmful to minors' must deploy technology to confirm user age, without requiring government-issued ID but prohibiting simple self-declaration.
- AI chatbot disclosure — artificial intelligence agents must acknowledge they are not human when a user asks.
- Disappearing message prohibition — minors cannot access ephemeral messaging features.
- Data broker registry — a new federal registry of data brokers creates transparency obligations for companies trading in personal data.
- Tiered preemption — federal rules supersede weaker state standards while permitting states to enact stricter protections; the bill also preempts some state AI laws.
These are not trivial measures. The age verification mandate in particular now rests on solid constitutional ground. The Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton (June 27, 2025) upheld a structurally identical Texas statute, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing that 'no person — adult or child — has a First Amendment right to access speech that is obscene to minors without first submitting proof of age.' The KIDS Act moves into that newly cleared constitutional space.
The Missing Lever
The omission of duty of care demands honest examination before any critique. Proponents — including 76 senators from across party lines who backed its inclusion — argue it was the only provision that would actually compel platforms to change how their products work. The duty of care, as drafted in KOSA, would have required platforms to take reasonable measures to prevent specific harms — suicidal ideation, eating disorders, cyberbullying — by modifying algorithmic and design features. Removing it means platforms can comply with every mandate in the KIDS Act while leaving their recommendation engines, engagement loops, and notification systems exactly as they are.
Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), one of KOSA's original sponsors alongside Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), did not soften her critique: 'Without a duty of care, Big Tech companies will maintain the status quo of putting profit before the safety of our children.'
The case for dropping duty of care is narrower but real. Republican leaders — and a significant coalition of civil liberties organizations — raised credible First Amendment objections to a vague mandate compelling platforms to suppress lawful speech in the name of child welfare. The ACLU argued the original provision would 'incentivize an enormous number of websites, apps, and online platforms to filter and block protected speech,' particularly content touching gender identity, abortion access, and mental health resources. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warned the ruling opened the door to age-verification regimes that undermine anonymity and create mass data-exposure risk. These are not bad-faith objections from Big Tech allies.
The legislative record confirms it. KOSA passed the Senate in July 2024 by an overwhelming 91-3 vote on the combined Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act — but the House never advanced it before the 118th Congress expired. The KIDS Act emerged from committee in March 2026 on a narrow 28-24 party-line vote, with Democrats objecting to preemption language and the duty-of-care gap. A bill that includes duty of care may be better policy; a bill that dies in conference is no policy at all.
The Preemption Problem
The preemption provisions may ultimately matter as much as duty of care. In May 2026, a bipartisan coalition of 44 state attorneys general sent a letter to Congress opposing the KIDS Act, arguing it would broadly sweep aside state laws that have already gone further to protect children online. New York AG Letitia James noted the bill would 'prevent states from addressing online threats to minors, including from social media, social gaming platforms, and AI chatbots.'
This tension reflects a genuine structural disagreement: should child online safety law be uniformly federal — giving platforms a single compliance target — or should states retain enforcement authority as a backstop and policy laboratory? The attorney general coalition favors the latter. Platform companies, predictably, favor federal uniformity. The KIDS Act's answer — a federal floor with state headroom above it — is a defensible compromise, but only if that floor is set high enough to matter.
What Passes Is What Matters
The KIDS Act is not the bill that advocates wanted. It is, however, the bill that could reach a House floor vote and become law — something four years of KOSA debate never achieved. The age verification mandate has fresh Supreme Court backing. The data broker registry fills a real gap in federal privacy architecture. The AI chatbot disclosure requirement is a proportionate, low-burden transparency measure.
What the bill does not do is reach inside platform architecture and require design changes. That is a serious limitation. But establishing minimum federal standards for data brokers, age-gated pornography, and AI transparency is not nothing — it is a floor, and one states are now permitted to build upon.
The duty of care fight is not over; it has simply moved to other arenas. FTC enforcement, state litigation under non-preempted statutes, and investor pressure on platform developers all remain available. Whether those levers move Big Tech further than a bill that had to shed its most ambitious provision to survive is the real question Congress has left unanswered.