House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders on Monday announced a bipartisan deal on a sweeping kids’ online safety package that has stalled in the chamber for years amid partisan disagreements.
The deal could unlock enough support to pass the House, but it still faces competition with Senate legislation that takes a different approach.
Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie, Kentucky Republican, and ranking member Frank Pallone, New Jersey Democrat, said they knew the issue would be one of the most significant challenges the committee would face this Congress.
That proved true, as the panel considered a package of bills in March called the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act that advanced without a single Democratic vote.
Mr. Guthrie and Mr. Pallone said they have spent the months since working across the aisle “and have now found common ground on policies to significantly improve the digital environment for kids.”
Legislative text of the deal is still being finalized but a source familiar with it described some of the key changes to The Washington Times.
One of Democrats’ objections to the version reported out of the committee in March was that it included language to preempt states from enacting or enforcing their own kids’ online safety laws.
The bipartisan deal would set a federal floor for online safety and privacy standards for minors that states cannot override, but would allow state laws that exceed them.
This benefits red and blue states alike that already have their own laws, such as Utah, New York, Texas, California and Florida.
The bipartisan deal also adds to the package a priority from Mr. Pallone creating a federal data broker registry that will provide more transparency to consumers about companies that are collecting their data.
The revised KIDS Act contains more than a dozen individual bills authored by committee members, including a version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) that has been the centerpiece of the years-long legislative effort.
KOSA requires social media companies to set minors’ settings to the maximum safety and privacy standards by default and alter design features that drive compulsive usage.
The original bipartisan version of KOSA passed the Senate in a 91-3 vote in 2024, but stalled in the House.
House Republicans rewrote it at least three times over the past two years to make it more palatable to their conference and to fortify it against likely legal challenges.
That included dropping a “duty-of-care” provision that requires social media companies to implement design standards to protect minors from specific harms and authorize the Federal Trade Commission to bring enforcement actions against companies that fail to do so.
The bipartisan agreement between Mr. Guthrie and Mr. Pallone still excludes the duty-of-care provision that several parental advocacy groups have said is a must-have mechanism to force social media companies’ compliance with other requirements in the bill.
Senate authors of KOSA are not willing to abandon the duty of care. Doing so would give “a blank check to Mark Zuckerberg to exploit children,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut Democrat, referring to the CEO of Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook.
“The House’s toothless & tepid capitulation is dead in the Senate & a betrayal of families suffering from Big Tech’s greed,” Mr. Blumenthal posted on X.
Although Mr. Pallone has signed off on the deal without the duty of care, it is not clear that all House Democrats will be willing to do the same.
The incentive is other pieces of the legislation that bipartisan coalitions have championed.
That includes measures to block private messaging for kids under 13 and disappearing messaging features for teens under 17, and safeguards for minors interacting with AI chatbots and using interactive video game platforms.
The package also updates a 1998 law that restricts the online collection, use, and disclosure of children’s personal information. The Senate unanimously passed its own version of that bill, called the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy and Protection Act, or COPPA 2.0, in March.
“Through empowering parents, establishing safety as a default, strengthening privacy for children and teens, increasing transparency around data brokers, and holding Big Tech accountable, the KIDS Act delivers the 21st-century protections parents have demanded and our kids deserve,” Mr. Guthrie and Mr. Pallone said.
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