Cantwell Staffer Expects House Floor Action for Kids’ Bills

House leaders will likely take up kids’ privacy legislation, but not before more legislative work is done on the House Commerce Committee-passed bills, a high-ranking Senate Commerce Committee staffer said Wednesday.

Shannon Smith, senior counsel to Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., has helped lead legislative efforts on the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0). She discussed House prospects during a panel discussion at the Center for Industry Self-Regulation Soft Law Summit.

Getting the bills to the floor is now a matter of legislative tweaks through discussions with House leaders, said Smith: “I think they will” get floor votes. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and House Commerce Committee Republicans discussed prospects with us last week (see 2409230044).

Smith agreed with two other panelists that there’s a greater possibility of passing the kids’ bills than approving a comprehensive privacy bill. The House Commerce Committee previously tried advancing the American Privacy Rights Act with language from kids’ privacy legislation (see 2406270046).

If the kids’ bills are ready for passage, there’s no reason to wait for a comprehensive bill, said Smith. However, she said it doesn’t need to be an all-or-nothing decision between the two. If the broader privacy bill is ready to advance, and it includes strong protections for children, that’s also a “great” outcome.

Trying to attach kids’ bill protections to the comprehensive measure seems like a good way to “muddy the waters and muck everything up,” said Christopher Olsen, a former FTC Consumer Protection Bureau deputy director now at Wilson Sonsini. Support for immediate action on the kids’ and teen social media front is greater at the federal and state levels, he said.

Online protections for children are more likely to pass first, Ann-Marie Adams, an instructor at Ithaca College, predicted. “If we could get a comprehensive [privacy law passed], that would be fabulous,” but demand is higher for the child protections, she said.

Smith and several other panelists agreed that tech industry self-regulation isn’t sufficient for proper protection of children. For example, Meta’s launch of Instagram Teen Accounts (see 2409170037) was an effort to get ahead of regulations proposed at the state and federal levels, said Smith: Meta was trying to say, “'We can handle this. We don’t need your stinking law'” to protect kids.

David Vladeck, a former FTC Consumer Protection Bureau director now a professor at Georgetown Law, said companies like Meta, Google and TikTok haven’t shown a genuine desire for protecting children, given their repeated FTC consent decree violations. “I’ve seen this movie before, and it always ends badly,” Vladeck said.