A bloc of 40 state and territorial attorneys general is urging Congress to adopt the Senate’s version of the controversial Kids Online Safety Act, positioning it as the stronger regulatory instrument and rejecting the House companion as insufficient.
The Act would kill online anonymity and tie online activity and speech to a real-world identity.
Acting through the National Association of Attorneys General, the coalition sent a letter to congressional leadership endorsing S. 1748 and opposing H.R. 6484.
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
Their request centers on structural differences between the bills. The Senate proposal would create a federally enforceable “Duty of Care” requiring covered platforms to mitigate defined harms to minors.
Enforcement authority would rest with the Federal Trade Commission, which could investigate and sue companies that fail to prevent minors from encountering content deemed to cause “harm to minors.”
That framework would require regulators to evaluate internal content moderation systems, recommendation algorithms, and safety controls.
S. 1748 also directs the Secretary of Commerce, the FTC, and the Federal Communications Commission to study “the most technologically feasible methods and options for developing systems to verify age at the device or operating system level.”
This language moves beyond platform-level age gates and toward infrastructure embedded directly into hardware or operating systems.
Age verification at that layer would not function without some form of credentialing. Device-level verification would likely depend on digital identity checks tied to government-issued identification, third-party age verification vendors, or persistent account authentication systems.
That means users could be required to submit identifying information before accessing broad categories of lawful online speech. Anonymous browsing depends on the ability to access content without linking identity credentials to activity.
Hellbound and Down 