Might get a quick ruling on this one.
On Tuesday morning, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman heard arguments for and against blocking a new law requiring parental consent for children under 18 to use their mobile device’s app store. The law — informally known as the App Store Accountability Act — will go into effect on Jan. 1 if Pitman does not block it beforehand.
“This is a broad brush complete ban to accessing the entire internet from a mobile device,” Stephanie Joyce, the senior vice president and director of litigation at the Center for the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), said. “CCIA has sued the state of Texas under the First Amendment because this statute completely bans anyone from getting speech.”
In addition to the parental permissions — the law also includes a provision requiring app developers to give an age rating to each app they develop and for each in-app purchase they offer. The app stores must then display those ratings. Additionally, if the app makes “any significant change to the terms of service or private policy of the software application,” the developer must notify the app store and adjust the age rating as necessary.
According to the law, a “significant change” includes:
- Changing the type or category of personal data collected, stored or shared by the developer;
- Affects or changes the age rating assigned to the application or the contents that led to the rating;
- Adds new monetization features, including new in-app purchases and new advertisements, or;
- Materially changes the functionality of the user experience.
State Sen. Angela Paxton, R-McKinney, authored SB 2420, citing concerns over children’s mental health.
“Growing concerns regarding the rise of social media and its pervasiveness in the lives of children and teens leave parents in the position of grasping for the best ways to protect their children,” the bill author’s statement of intent says. “Unlike brick and mortar stores which must verify a consumer’s age before the purchase of age restricted products such as alcohol and cigarettes, minors are currently able to navigate through the digital world without such parameters.”
The letter of intent also argues that because major app stores already tout age verification, the bill “simply provides additional framework, transparency, and enforcement to protect the children of Texas.”
[…]
The CCIA says the legislature’s arguments over online safety are flawed because they feel parent’s already have the right to control their children’s content.
“This applies to the entire app store, not just particular content that the state might find objectionable,” Joyce said. “It bars the New York Times, it bars Sesame Street. Because Texas believes it knows better than parents. Texas wants to conscript parents into Texas’ censorious regime, [and] make them proxy censors rather than letting parents choose what their children see. Rather than trusting parents to, as the court today noted, use the tools already available to them to protect their children.”
Students Engaged for Advancing Texas (SEAT) are also challenging the lawsuit alongside the CCIA. They say the law violates the free speech rights of minors by limiting access to the apps where they can promote speech.
“SB 2420 deprives students of our First Amendment rights on the internet,” SEAT Co-Founder Cameron Samuels, said. “The internet is our reality. Students have free speech rights too. We deserve access to resources that could save our lives, like the Trevor Project Suicide Prevention lifeline that was blocked in my school district.”
See here and here for some background on the two lawsuits. That second link has a lot of information about the law and what it would mean, beginning on January 1 if it is allowed to go into effect, so read that if you want to know more. My best guess is that Judge Pitman will block at least some aspects of this law though perhaps not all of them. After that it goes to the Fifth Circuit and from there who knows. They’ve been at least somewhat accommodating of free speech arguments in similar cases, so we’ll see. I think it’s likely we’ll get a ruling on the request for a temporary restraining order before the end of the month.
There was a story in the Business section of the print version of the Chron on Wednesday but I couldn’t find it online. That may mean that it was actually an Express News story, but either way it didn’t show up in a Google news search; only this KXAN story did. See here and here for more from the CCIA, one of the plaintiffs in the suit.