The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently held a summit on “The Attention Economy: How Big Tech Firms Exploit Children and Hurt Families.” The summit’s purpose was to “examine how big tech companies impose addictive design features, erode parental authority, and fail to protect children from exposure to harmful content,” and “explore how the FTC, Congress, state governments, and other organizations can help support parents and protect children online.”
This sounds like a worthy endeavor. After all, what reasonable person could oppose protecting the children? Anyone who values liberty and limited government for starters. “It’s for the children” is often the the rallying cry of the worst type of tyrant: one who acts out of a sincere belief that they are taking away the people’s liberty for their own good. Secondly, “protecting children” from online dangers seems beyond the FTC’s mandate to protect consumers from unfair or deceitful business practices and enforce antitrust laws.
Unfortunately, these concerns were not raised at the summit, since all the speakers supported the FTC advancing this conservative social agenda. Amongst the policies endorsed by the panelists was mandatory age verification. For example, FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson said, “we must go beyond the current legal regime, which conditions unfettered access to online services on nothing more than an unverified, self-reported birthdate.” Chair Ferguson, and his fellow supporters of mandatory age verification, brush aside the fact that requiring all users of a website to verify their age violates the constitutionally protected right to anonymity.
Federal courts have consistently ruled that government may not pursue a legitimate goal via means that place an “undue burden” on an individual’s exercise of their constitutional rights—which is why courts have ruled against some state age verification laws. Mandatory verification laws that force users to give their personal data to operators of “adult” websites are also ineffective and unnecessary. Louisiana has created a digital driver’s license called the LA Wallet. This digital driver’s license can be used to verify someone's age without requiring the site to collect and store their users' personal information
Another way to ensure minors are not accessing adult sites is device level verification—which is being developed by the company Aylo. This allows parents to automatically block access to certain content on their child’s devices. An FTC-mandated verification system will create a disincentive for states and private companies to develop innovative ways of stopping children from viewing age-inappropriate material. It is possible that Ferguson and his allies are not interested in solutions that don’t involve expanding government power. Chair Ferguson stated that “we have a God-given right and duty to question whether it [the social change brought about by technology]" should simply be accepted "with resignation and indifference.” This is true of private individuals acting through their business, religious institutions, or other civil society organizations. However, in a free society, government officials must accept technological and social change with resignation. Otherwise, they will violate the people’s liberty and prevent the widespread adoption of beneficial changes.
Michael Toscano of the Family Institute made a more disturbing statement, “there are ways to encode certain values into technological design…we have a responsibility as a political, social, and economic matter to ensure that technology is ordered towards human flourishing and the common good.” So the FTC must ensure technological change has certain values that promote human flourishing and the common good?
Mr. Toscano’s statement assumes that there exists some social consensus about what promotes human flourishing and the common good. But that is not the case. In fact, Mr. Toscano may regret advocating for the FTC to adopt this ambitious agenda when it is being used to promote a progressive vision of what constitutes human flourishing and the common good. Protecting children from inappropriate content and other online dangers is too important to be left to government. It is the responsibility of parents. Fortunately, there are tools to help parents control what their child is exposed to on social media, streaming, browsing, and gaming. There is no need for the FTC to intervene—there is a need for parents to be responsible. As the late Frank Zappa put it, “a lot of people who cry out for government intervention or… to help raise and control their children are people who are just too lazy to do it themselves… Grandma never would have put up with this shit."
