A vote that wasn't a vote
On August 5, 2026, the Senate Commerce Committee took up S.737, the SCREEN Act, in a markup alongside the Kids Online Safety Act. KOSA advanced. The SCREEN Act did not — not because it lost, but because too few senators stayed in the room. The panel voted 15-13 along party lines to advance Sen. Mike Lee's bill, but the tally didn't meet quorum, so the bill remains stuck in committee. It is a procedural reprieve, not a defeat: Lee and his four Republican cosponsors have the votes: they just need a room with enough senators in it.
That distinction matters because the SCREEN Act — formally the Shielding Children's Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net Act — is not a routine kids-safety bill. It requires any "commercial interactive computer service" that makes available content harmful to minors to verify every visitor's age, and it explicitly bars simple self-declaration ("requiring a user to confirm that the user is not a minor shall not be sufficient"). Most notably for readers of this publication, it singles out anonymization tools: covered services must subject IP addresses, "including known virtual proxy network (VPN) IP addresses," to the same verification technology. VPN use itself becomes a trigger for identity checks.
The steelman
Before dismissing that as overreach, it's worth taking the child-safety case seriously. Minors' routine access to hardcore pornography is a real and measurable harm, and Congress has legitimate authority to restrict it. The federal government is already moving in this direction on its own: on February 25, 2026, the FTC issued a COPPA enforcement policy statement declining to pursue general-audience operators who deploy age-verification tools with proper data-minimization safeguards — the Commission's own language called such technology "some of the most child-protective" innovations in decades. The Age Verification Providers Association, an industry group representing roughly 30 age-assurance vendors, says its members ran over a billion age checks last year without a major breach, evidence that the technology has matured well past its early, clumsy iterations. And the constitutional ground has shifted: in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on June 27, 2025, that Texas could require age verification for sexually explicit sites under intermediate scrutiny, treating the requirement as analogous to age checks for alcohol. Age-gating pornography is no longer a constitutionally fraught novelty — it is settled, narrow-purpose law.
Where the SCREEN Act overshoots
The problem is that S.737 doesn't stop at the narrow thing Paxton blessed. Texas's HB 1181 applied only to sites where sexual material makes up a third or more of content. The SCREEN Act has no such threshold: EFF has warned it could sweep in Netflix, Reddit, Discord, and Bluesky if any one of those platforms hosts even a single qualifying item, since the bill's "commercial interactive computer service" definition isn't limited to dedicated adult sites. California's AB 1043, by contrast, ties obligations to whether adult content constitutes a meaningful share of a site's material — the kind of proportionality guardrail S.737 skips entirely.
The VPN provision compounds the problem rather than closing a loophole. Treating VPN or proxy traffic as an automatic verification trigger punishes the exact behavior privacy-conscious users are supposed to exhibit: using encrypted tunnels on public Wi-Fi, masking location for safety, or simply declining to hand every website their raw IP address. It does not distinguish a 45-year-old journalist on a NordVPN connection from an unverified minor; it flags them identically. Neither the UK's Online Safety Act nor the EU's CSAM framework — the two most aggressive peer regimes — singles out VPN traffic this way, because doing so pushes the exact people most likely to already understand digital security toward workarounds (offshore mirrors, Tor, unregulated foreign sites) rather than toward compliance.
That's the deeper flaw: a VPN-specific trigger does not verify age so much as it verifies which users bothered to protect their privacy, then imposes the compliance burden on them specifically. Combined with the bill's silence on how long age-verification vendors may retain the identity data they collect — a gap CDT and EFF have both flagged — the SCREEN Act asks millions of adults to surrender anonymity to third-party verification services with weaker guardrails than the FTC's own February policy statement already requires of COPPA-adjacent operators.
What should happen next
The quorum failure buys Congress a rewrite window it should actually use. A narrower SCREEN Act — with a Paxton-style content-share threshold, firm data-retention limits modeled on the FTC's own COPPA statement, and no clause that treats VPN traffic as inherently suspect — would likely survive both political and constitutional scrutiny. The version that cleared committee 15-13 does not need a better vote count next time. It needs a smaller bill.