Washington’s latest attempt to “fix” the internet—the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA)—is a familiar story: a real concern, a politically appealing response, and a policy design that risks making the underlying problem worse.
There is no dispute that parents should be able to push for better tools to manage how their children engage with digital platforms. Nor is there any question that the current ecosystem is imperfect. But as with earlier legislative efforts like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), the issue is not whether parental concerns are legitimate—it is whether the proposed solution is effective and consistent with the broader architecture of a free and open digital economy.
On those terms, ASAA falls short.
The legislation would require app stores to verify the age of users and, in many cases, obtain parental consent before minors can download apps. On paper, that sounds straightforward. In practice, it implies the construction of a system-wide identity verification infrastructure that reaches far beyond the limited objective of protecting children. Instead it would reshape how all users interact with digital services.
Such a system inevitably requires the collection and retention of sensitive personal data at scale. Lawmakers often assume that age verification can be both reliable and privacy-preserving. But at the level of precision required to enforce legal obligations, those goals are in tension. The more confidence regulators demand, the more intrusive the verification process becomes. The result is not a light-touch safeguard, but a de facto digital ID regime that creates new vulnerabilities even as it attempts to mitigate existing ones.
This is where the lessons from earlier debates, including KOSA, become relevant. Regulation does not operate in a vacuum. It operates through incentives. And when liability is tied to uncertainty—as it would be here—firms do not calibrate to the minimum necessary standard. They overcorrect.
With KOSA, the concern was over-moderation, where platforms will remove lawful content to avoid regulatory exposure. With ASAA, app stores that fear noncompliance will over-verify. They will collect more data than policymakers intend, impose stricter access controls than envisioned, and restrict participation in ways that extend well beyond the statute’s stated goals.
In other words, the burden on companies needing to comply is not incidental to the policy—it is the purpose of the policy. And that burden is not evenly distributed.
Compliance with complex verification and consent regimes is easier for large, incumbent platforms than for smaller or emerging competitors. Building secure identity systems, managing legal exposure, and navigating a fragmented regulatory landscape all require resources that are easier for dominant firms. The predictable result is further consolidation—not because of market success, but because of regulatory design.
This is a recurring pattern in technology policy: proposals that are marketed as checks on large platforms ultimately reinforce their position by raising the cost of entry for everyone else.
ASAA also targets the wrong point in the system.
App stores are not the Internet. They are one distribution channel among many on the Internet. Content—beneficial and harmful alike—flows through browsers, direct downloads, and a host of other pathways that fall outside the scope of the legislation. By focusing regulatory obligations on app stores alone, ASAA creates a framework that is punitive on a single category of service and easily circumvented. Determined users will route around it, while the app providers bear the entire cost.
This is a recipe for symbolic policy—visible, politically satisfying, and operationally limited.
There is also a broader issue of coherence. ASAA sits alongside other legislative proposals that impose overlapping, and at times contradictory obligations on platforms. Some measures encourage greater openness and competition in app distribution. Others, like ASAA, impose new layers of control at the same chokepoints. The result is not a balanced framework, but a patchwork of mandates that pull in different directions.
Over time, that kind of incoherence creates compliance challenges, but also reshapes the market in unpredictable ways.
Perhaps most importantly, ASAA reflects a deeper shift in how policymakers are approaching digital regulation. Earlier efforts focused on governing content—what users can see, share, or access. ASAA moves one step further toward governing user identity—users must reveal and prove their identities to participate at all.
A system that conditions access on verified identity changes the nature of the digital environment. It raises barriers to entry, reduces the space for anonymous or pseudonymous engagement, and creates new points of control that can be expanded over time. What begins as a child-safety measure can, through incremental adjustments, evolve into a broader framework for access control.
We have seen this pattern before in other regulatory contexts. Flexibility at the outset often gives way to rigidity in practice, as agencies interpret and expand their authority. The likelihood that ASAA will be implemented poorly is made worse by the risk that that it will establish a precedent that future policymakers build upon in ways that are difficult to predict—and harder to unwind.
The status quo is not acceptable, and policymakers should consider action. But effective policy requires discipline. It requires targeting interventions narrowly, aligning incentives with desired outcomes, and minimizing unintended consequences.
Congress should focus on empowering parents, supporting voluntary tools, and addressing specific harms at their source—not constructing a system-wide identity verification regime that imposes broad costs while offering limited and easily bypassed benefits.
Andrew Langer is President of the Institute for Liberty.
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