The KIDS Act uses a negligence standard to make age-checking the safe default for every site
The bill never says 'verify everyone's age.' It says platforms are liable if they 'knew or should have known' a user was a minor — and the cheapest way to never be wrong is to check everyone.
The EFF reads the KIDS Act (built around KOSA, H.R.7757) as age verification by indirection. Instead of mandating ID checks, it sets a 'know or should have known' negligence standard for under-13 and 13-16 users, pushing every covered service to verify all ages to avoid liability. The result, EFF argues, is a less private internet for adults too.
The most-cited voice was a founder who dislikes the bill yet explained its support: for non-tech-savvy homes the real choice today is no devices or kids raised by addictive feeds, because the industry refuses to give parents working tools.
Age verification the bill is careful never to require
The EFF's Joe Mullin argues that the KIDS Act — a package built around the Kids Online Safety Act plus companion bills, headed for an expedited vote within a week of the June 24 post — forces age checks without ever writing the words. The lever is a negligence standard: a covered service must apply special protections once it 'knows or should have known' a user is under 13, or between 13 and 16. Because guessing wrong creates liability, the rational move is to verify everyone. EFF's conclusion is blunt: 'The result is a less private internet for everyone,' since adults end up proving their age too, and anonymous access erodes. The post also flags KOSA's duty to address broad content categories — drugs, gambling, alcohol, financial fraud — as pressure to scrub lawful speech about addiction recovery and harm reduction.
The steelman from someone who hates the bill
The thread split, and its most-cited comment came from a founder who opened by saying he is not a fan of these solutions, then explained why they have public support anyway:
"Right now if you are not a tech-savvy parent your choices are: (1) deny children access to devices … or (2) allow your kids to be raised by super-addictive infinite scroll brain rot feeds … the profit motive is to prevent parents from having this control" — the founder of ZeroTier
His point was that the industry's refusal to ship parental tools is what makes a clumsy law look reasonable. A working engineer pushed the opposite way with a concrete trap: WhatsApp ships a hidden chat revealed by a secret code, so even an attentive parent can't audit their kid's phone.
"From the password to encrypted apps kids can hide their communications in ways that are impossible for a parent to check" — an engineer describing WhatsApp's hidden-chat feature
Does the bill even cover the sites people mean?
A close reading of the statute became its own debate. One commenter parsed the covered-platform definition and concluded HN, banks, and personal blogs fall outside it, because they don't use personal information to advertise or recommend content:
"the thing the bill would require age checks for … is not 'get online' but something more like 'get on social media'" — a commenter parsing the covered-platform definition
Others shot back that any ad-funded site fits that language, which is most of the web, and that 'get on social media' is functionally 'get online' for ordinary people. A separate reading pointed to the one-third-sexual-material clause as the narrow door that gets widened later by reinterpretation.
A 38-year-old script, and who's paying for it
The historical frame came from a commenter citing the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse — Timothy May's 1988 coinage for the 'child pornographers, terrorists, drug dealers' invoked to justify limiting civilian cryptography:
"We're approaching forty years of this" — a commenter citing the 1988 Four Horsemen coinage
Where the thread turned actionable was a comment naming the actual bill and its money: H.R.7757, sponsored by Brett Guthrie (R-KY) and co-sponsored by Frank Pallone (D-NJ), with OpenSecrets donor links attached. That bipartisan sponsorship is the part that should unsettle readers who assumed this was one party's project: a surveillance default built into a child-safety wrapper has no opposition party to vote it down.
Get breakdowns like this every day
The top Hacker News stories, unpacked — by email, Telegram, or RSS.
A PCMag columnist's inversion: the US that demanded the best tech now bans it
DJI drones, Chinese EVs, Xiaomi's SU7, cars that phone home: a PCMag opinion piece argues America has flipped from importing the world's best gadgets to legislating them out of reach. The thread mostly agreed, then sharpened where the logic breaks.