Age verification rides in on the KIDS Act compromise

The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s bipartisan KIDS Act — the chamber’s vehicle for the long-running Kids Online Safety Act — strips out the duty-of-care provision 76 senators have backed, which is the headline The Record leads with. The provision worth watching from an identity angle is the one that survived: a mandate that pornography sites verify users’ ages, alongside AI-chatbot human-disclosure rules, a ban on disappearing messages for minors, and a data-broker registry.

Age verification is digital identity wearing a child-safety jacket, and the privacy tradeoff is the familiar one. The Center for Democracy and Technology’s Kate Ruane warns the bill “will incentivize age verification to access online services, putting the privacy of all internet users — kids and adults alike — at risk,” because age-gating a site means every visitor, adult included, hands over more identifying detail to get in. That is structurally the same tension running through the FCC’s KYC docket: a verification mandate aimed at a narrow harm that ends up conscripting the whole population into proving who they are.

The piece is mostly a legislative-process story, and the duty-of-care fight is the part Congress is actually arguing about. But the age-assurance layer is the one that compounds across cycles — Sen. Blackburn’s competing version reportedly adds AI-deepfake rules and parental-consent gates on app downloads, pushing further into identity territory. Whichever vehicle moves, age verification keeps accreting into federal law one child-safety bill at a time, and the “how do you prove age without building a surveillance rail” question stays unanswered. One to keep in the file as the identity-mandate pattern repeats.