KOSA stalls in Senate as age assurance moves into online safety debate

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) has again hit a congressional roadblock, leaving unresolved not only how far online platforms should be required to go to protect minors, but also an increasingly important question for the digital identity industry: how platforms will know which users are children in the first place.

Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul on Wednesday blocked Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, from passing the KOSA by unanimous consent.

The objection did not defeat the legislation, but it prevented supporters from moving the bill through the Senate by the fastest available procedure before lawmakers left Washington for the pre-election recess.

The Senate Press Gallery reported that Blumenthal asked for unanimous consent to pass S. 1748, and Paul objected.

The Senate is now scheduled to conduct only pro forma sessions until it returns for legislative business after the midterm elections on November 9.

KOSA has strong bipartisan backing, but Congress remains divided over what the legislation should require.

The Senate Committee on Commerce advanced an amended version of S. 1748 by voice vote on August 5. The Senate bill includes a “duty of care” requiring covered online platforms to exercise reasonable care in designing and implementing features to prevent or mitigate specified harms to minors.

Those harms include sexual exploitation and abuse, suicidal behavior, eating and substance use disorders, compulsive use, and certain clinically diagnosable anxiety and depressive disorders associated with compulsive platform use.

The House has already passed a substantially different approach.

On June 29, lawmakers approved the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act) H.R. 7757. The vote included 162 Republicans and 104 Democrats in favor, while 32 Republicans and 85 Democrats opposed it.

The House package incorporates a version of KOSA but eliminates the Senate’s duty of care. Instead, covered platforms would be required to establish and enforce reasonable policies, practices, and procedures to address specified harms to minors.

The duty-of-care provision has become a central point of disagreement between the two approaches.

KOSA’s principal Senate sponsors, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, and Sen. Blumenthal, criticized the House bill immediately after its passage, saying they would not support legislation without the duty-of-care standard.

Commerce committee ranking member Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, has also argued that the House legislation weakened significant protections contained in the Senate approach.

Paul’s objection comes from the opposite direction. He argues that the duty of care would encourage platforms to restrict constitutionally protected material to avoid liability and effectively turn companies into government-directed content moderators.

The American Civil Liberties Union also continues to oppose both KOSA and the House KIDS Act on First Amendment grounds.

Democrat Sen. Edward Markey voted to advance KOSA from the Commerce committee but said afterward that he remains concerned the legislation could be used against LGBTQ+ young people.

For biometric and digital identity providers, however, one of the most consequential provisions may be something neither bill explicitly requires.

Both S. 1748 and the Kids Online Safety section of the House-passed KIDS Act say their provisions should not be interpreted as requiring platforms to implement age gating or age verification. The broader House package, however, separately includes provisions requiring age checks for certain platforms carrying sexual material harmful to minors.

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) nevertheless says that may not end the matter.

In an analysis comparing the two bills, CRS said that if either proposal becomes law, some operators may use age-verification methods to identify minors so they can determine which users fall under the new protections. Other platforms could instead apply the protections to everyone.

That creates an important practical distinction between a statutory mandate to verify age and a compliance environment that incentivizes companies to do so.

Both bills impose requirements that depend on whether a platform knows a user is a minor.

The Senate bill defines “know” or “knows” as actual knowledge or knowledge “fairly implied on the basis of objective circumstances,” while the House measure uses a “know or should have known” standard.

The Senate proposal would also direct the Federal Trade Commission to issue guidance on how that knowledge standard should be applied.

Platforms seeking to determine whether those obligations apply could therefore turn to age assurance technologies, ranging from government-issued identity documents and reusable digital credentials to facial age estimation and other methods for inferring whether a user is above or below an age threshold.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has argued that this is precisely what could happen, warning that platforms seeking to avoid liability may seek additional evidence of users’ ages through identification documents or age-estimation systems, including facial-analysis technologies.

CRS does not say that outcome is inevitable. Its analysis explicitly notes that operators could instead change services for all users. But its assessment underscores a recurring problem in online child safety legislation. Legal protections that apply specifically to minors can create a need to distinguish minors from adults, even when lawmakers stop short of requiring formal identity or age verification.

KOSA still has a possible route during the lame-duck session beginning November 9. Its sponsors could seek a regular floor vote rather than unanimous consent, though the Senate and House would still need to resolve their substantive differences before the current Congress expires.

The 119th Congress ends January 3, 2027. If the legislation is not enacted by then, the current bills will die and must be reintroduced in the 120th Congress.

Article Topics

age verification  |  Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act)  |  Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)  |  legislation  |  U.S. Government  |  United States