Lawmakers in Congress are attempting to test whether the U.S. Code and the bureaucrats who interpret and enforce it can substitute effectively for parents. In almost every context, this proposition would be dismissed by the American people as absurd. The internet has, however, destabilized this conviction, and many now believe that the government ought to operate as a parent in the digital domain to a degree unthinkable in any other.
This month, the House Energy and Commerce (E&C) Committee advanced the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (a compendium of ten or so sundry proposals, including the Kids Online Safety Act), the App Store Accountability Act, and Sammy’s Law. The policies contained in these proposals are myriad—many bad, some middling, some, perhaps, even salutary. I do not attempt a full analysis here. Rather, I posit that this sprawling regulatory package, like an archer shooting at the wrong target, rests on a bad premise and, consequently, cannot succeed in its aim of defending children from the real and imagined dangers of the digital world. Searching for a remedy on Capitol Hill, and not at the kitchen tables in family homes across America, will inexorably end in failure.
The notion that a single, rigid standard—formulated in Congress and imposed indiscriminately on Americans—can protect children as well as parents can seems deeply implausible in light of commonly accepted premises about families and their relationship to the state. The government cannot love you, as the saying goes, and it cannot love your child. Moreover, the government does not know your child, observe him every day, or comprehend his nature, his talents and shortcomings, and his desires and fears. To date, we have forestalled the coming of 1984: Bureaucrats cannot see into homes to observe the innumerable daily familial interactions that serve as the inputs of parental decisionmaking. Life online does not differ from life offline in this respect: The decisions made by parents, and those decisions’ enforcement, are the product of deep, localized knowledge and close, long-running observation.
Children are ingenious and persistent; the theme of nearly every high school movie is the rulebreaking that appeals so greatly to the teenage heart, and children today deploy the same ingenuity and persistence to gain access to the digital platforms and media they desire. A federal standard for children’s online safety promising to ameliorate the difficulties of the online world would amount to a known barrier that children, and especially teenagers, would soon learn to evade. To prevent such circumventions, public policy has only one recourse: ever more domineering regulations, which would damage the foundations of the free and open internet and, in an increasingly digital age, the free society itself.
Active and involved parenting provides a better remedy. Parents see and talk to their children every day. They know and love their children, and have the continuous contact needed to enforce homemade rules related to online safety. If they wish, they can, using features at the app, device, and network levels, reduce the functionality of a child’s smartphone to that of a flip phone. They can, moreover, monitor much of what their children do online to an extent impossible for any but the most authoritarian of states. Parents can act and adapt more flexibly than any statute or government agency, and it is that very capacity that renders them more capable than the government of effectively protecting children.
Many parents do not utilize child-safety features because they do not know of them, or how to use them; others, because they do not believe technology to be as dangerous to children as do the members of the E&C Committee. Neither attitude can be changed by mere legislative action. No regulation enacted by Congress is likely to alter the habits of American parents. The now-available tools have not failed; they have yet to be deployed to their fullest power.
This is not to say that all is well, that nothing ought to be done, or that in the main American parents—often understandably overwhelmed at the prospect of parenting a generation of digital natives—have become willfully negligent toward their children. Digital education initiatives have been undertaken in several states, giving families the knowledge of what perils are present online and how families can confront them.
Reflecting on the State of Florida’s admirable digital-education initiative, the James Madison Institute’s Turner Loesel writes, “True parental empowerment comes from equipping families with the knowledge and tools they need to make smart choices, not from a one-size-fits-all government mandate.” That aim, agreed upon by almost everyone, is to protect children online. This requires energetic and effective parental supervision and involvement, which existing child-safety tools make possible. Such supervision and involvement will require education and something of an evolution in the attitudes and habits of American society. This is a project which Congress’s online safety agenda cannot accomplish.
