Earlier this year, juries in California and New Mexico returned significant verdicts against Meta for harms inflicted on children through its platforms. Within hours, some supporters of the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA) seized on the verdicts as proof that legislatures must enact the bill. The irony is breathtaking: Meta has spent millions lobbying for this very bill in more than half of U.S. state legislatures and Congress precisely to avoid paying judgments like the ones recently handed down.
The lobbying campaign has only intensified as the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee is poised to consider several kids’ safety measures along with an artificial intelligence (AI) framework later this month. If you're wondering why a platform giant would bankroll legislation branded as "accountability," the answer is simple—it's an escape hatch, not a reform.
The Liability Shell Game.
ASAA would mandate age verification for every potential user before they can access an app store. Think of it as carding kids at the movie theater entrance, then waving them into an R-rated film once they're inside. The age gate sits with Apple and Google, not with the companies whose platforms kids ultimately use. For Meta, this arrangement is a masterstroke. By forcing app stores to verify ages upfront, ASAA allows Meta to claim it currently lacks "actual knowledge" that any user is under 13—the trigger for liability under the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and a linchpin in cases like those that just produced nine-figure verdicts. If the app store handles age assurance at the door, then Meta can argue it never knew who walked in until ASAA passed.
This isn't speculation. It's the predictable consequence of shifting responsibility upstream. Meta doesn't want to be held accountable for implementing robust protections tailored to its own products. It wants someone else to do the work—and shoulder the risk—so it can deny knowledge and duck liability. These recent verdicts show what happens when Meta can't make that denial stick in court. ASAA would hand Meta the statutory cover it needs to make precisely that argument in future cases.
The Collateral Damage to Small Developers.
The worst part of Meta's campaign, aside from not protecting kids, is that ASAA treats every single app as if it poses the same risk to children as Instagram or Snapchat. A stargazing app. A back-office management tool for pig farmers. An app developed by a student with tutorials on how to tie boat knots. All would be swept into the same cumbersome compliance regime, forced to accept the app store's age verification flags, giving all entities with apps "actual knowledge" of user ages—even if the app itself has nothing to do with children and collects no personal data. Under COPPA, “actual knowledge” triggers a cascade of obligations: verifiable parental consent (VPC), data minimization, and the ability to revoke VPC, which requires the association of child and guardian accounts. Small developers who never designed for kids, never marketed to kids, and never wanted to serve kids would suddenly face exposure to creative trial bar theories of liability based on a statutory flag they didn't create and can't control.
The Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) represents small and mid-size app developers worldwide. Many build powerful niche tools with tiny teams and no legal department. ASAA would subject them to the same liability framework as Meta and Snapchat, without the resources to navigate it. Meta doesn't care about trial attorneys feasting on small business developers so long as Instagram is no longer on the menu. This is regulatory arbitrage dressed up as child safety, and small innovators are the collateral damage.
The Better Path Forward.
None of this means Congress should ignore online risks to children. But ASAA is not a serious solution. It creates a Rube Goldberg machine of age verification that inconveniences millions of adults, undermines app store parental controls that already work, and shields the very platforms whose conduct prompted calls for reform in the first place. If supporters genuinely want accountability, they should ask why Meta is spending so heavily to pass a bill that purports to hold it accountable or just protecting kids in the first place.
A far better approach is the Parents Over Platforms Act (POPA), which gives parents a choice as to whether to share age information with developers and preserves the robust parental controls that app stores have built over years. POPA doesn't replace the tools families already rely on with failure-prone schemes. It doesn't force every app into a one-size-fits-all compliance trap. And it doesn't hand Meta a statutory escape route from the consequences of its own design choices.
As state legislatures and Congress consider their next moves, small business innovators are watching carefully. When a platform facing multi-billion-dollar verdicts bankrolls legislation called "accountability," it's worth asking who's actually being held accountable—and who's getting a free pass. The answers in this case are clear: Meta wants out, and everyone else would pay the price.
