• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, May 1, 2025

Two Republican lawmakers on Thursday introduced a bill that would require large app distributors like Google and Apple to verify users' ages, and prevent minors under 18 from downloading any apps without parental permission.

The App Store Accountability Act, introduced by Senator Mike Lee (Utah) and Representative John James (Michigan), is similar to a first-of-its-kind Utah law passed in March.

Lee said in a post on X that his bill would “protect children in America and around the world.”

“Big Tech has profited from leading kids to inappropriate & dangerous content through app stores, even exposing their personal information to predators,” he wrote.

The federal proposal comes as individual states have been enacting laws that require social platforms including Meta and Snap to verify users' ages and restrict minors' ability to create accounts.

The tech industry group NetChoice has sued to strike down many of those statutes on First Amendment grounds, arguing both that age verification mandates are unconstitutional in themselves, and that minors have the right to access lawful speech. So far, such laws have been blocked in states including Ohio, Utah, Mississippi, Texas and Arkansas.

Despite their membership in NetChoice, Meta and Snap are supporting laws that would require app stores to determine users' ages.

“In the physical world, society has established age-based restrictions for certain activities, including driving, voting and watching certain films,” Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel opined Thursday in The Hill. “These guardrails exist for good reason, and reflect our understanding of developmental stages and the capacity for responsible decision-making. There’s no reason why the digital world should operate by entirely different rules.” 

Meta also has argued that app marketplaces should obtain parental permission before allowing minors to download apps.

“By verifying a teen’s age on the app store, individual apps would not be required to collect potentially sensitive identifying information,” Meta's Antigone Davis, global safety head, wrote in November 2023. “Parents and teens won’t need to provide the hundreds of apps their teens use with sensitive information like government IDs.”

Google, which distributes apps through the Play Store, lobbied against the Utah bill. The company argued in March that requiring app stores to verify downloaders' ages would “introduce new risks to the privacy of minors, without actually addressing the harms that are inspiring lawmakers to act.”

The tech funded policy group Chamber of Progress, which also opposed the Utah bill, said earlier this year that it would violate the First Amendment by forcing minors and adults “to choose between sacrificing their privacy by disclosing sensitive personal information (their own or, in the case of a minor user’s parents, their children’s) and accessing legally protected online speech.”

On Thursday the organization raised similar concerns about the federal proposal.