A trade group whose members include Google, Apple, and other major app store operators asked the US Supreme Court to halt a Texas law requiring age verification to download smart phone apps after a district judge’s injunction was lifted earlier this month.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association filed an emergency request Monday with Justice Samuel Alito to vacate an order by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit allowing Texas’ App Store Accountability Act to go into effect. The law requires app stores to verify the age of users and minors to link their app accounts to a parent or guardian, who must consent before they can download apps or make in-app purchases.
The law, CCIA argued, unconstitutionally requires app stores to police access to “vast amounts of online speech” by minors and adults alike.
Three other states—Alabama, Louisiana, and Utah—have enacted similar laws. California has also passed a law requiring operating systems to communicate the age range of users to apps for compliance with child safety laws.
See here for the previous update. SCOTUSBlog adds some details.
A student group and a trade association came to the Supreme Court on Monday afternoon on its interim docket, asking the justices to restore orders by a federal judge in Austin, Texas, that bar the state from enforcing a law that imposes age-verification and parental-consent requirements on minors’ access to apps and paid content within those apps. Half the states have similar age-verification requirements for minors.
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The students argued in the Supreme Court that the 5th Circuit’s decision “would render virtually the entire internet—not to mention the distribution of every book, newspaper, magazine, movie, or record album—‘commercial speech’ the government could more readily ban, restrict, edit, or compel. That is clearly wrong.” Moreover, they added, Texas already shields children from accessing adult content online; the law’s stated goal of protecting them “from ‘accessing harmful or inappropriate content’ … is not a valid government interest.”
The CCIA contended that the 5th Circuit’s decision “has upset the status quo by allowing the Act to be enforced for the first time, exposing app stores and millions of app developers to potential liability” and subjecting them to “enormous and unrecoverable compliance costs.” And in any event, it continued, the app stores that the CCIA’s members operate already “provide various, voluntary tools that enable parents to control their children’s exposure to apps and content.”
Justice Samuel Alito, who handles emergency applications from the 5th Circuit, instructed Texas to respond to the challengers’ filings by 4 p.m. EDT on Monday, June 22.
Remember, this is not about the merits of the lawsuit but about whether the law can be enforced while it is being litigated. We ought to get a ruling in a fairly short timeline.