Overview
- House Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie and Ranking Member Frank Pallone unveiled the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act as a bipartisan package combining sections of KOSA and COPPA 2.0, with committee leaders announcing the agreement on Monday.
- The bill would require pornography websites to implement age-verification measures, expand privacy protections for users up to age 17, strengthen default safety settings for minors, and create rules for games, messaging and AI chatbots.
- It would establish a data-broker registry overseen by the FTC and use a tiered knowledge standard so large platforms face stricter consent requirements than smaller companies.
- The House version expressly omits a statutory 'duty of care' design requirement sought by some Democrats and Senate sponsors, and it narrows federal preemption so states may enact stronger protections than the federal baseline.
- Advocates and legal observers warn the final text could affect thousands of ongoing child-harm lawsuits and note earlier tech lobbying for liability limits, so the bill must be reconciled with a different Senate draft and cleared by the president before becoming law.