Just now we had a guest post from Parkview Institute president John Tamny, who our readers might know best for his frequent columns at RealClear Markets, grousing about HB 570, which is the bill moving through the Louisiana legislature that would begin to regulate app stores in the sense that kids under 18 wouldn’t be able to download phone apps without parental consent.
Tamny says this is a very Karenish bill, and casts Rep. Kim Carver, its author, and every single other member of the Louisiana House who voted in favor of the bill, as akin to those obnoxious adults offering unsolicited parenting advice in airplanes or parks or other public places when kids appear to pose difficulties.
His argument, as his arguments often are – and I’m quite often persuaded by them – comes from an extreme libertarian perspective.
I want to be a libertarian, and I’ll take libertarian views when I can see them as practical (which is less than all of the time, as most people recognize). I think all the ridiculous licensing requirements this state imposes on various non-dangerous professions are atrocious, for example.
And this isn’t my favorite bill. Usually I’m less than enthused about placing more rules and restrictions on people. To pass something like this, if it were up to me the Legislature ought to be obligated to eliminate at least two other laws obstructing normal life in our state.
But it certainly doesn’t make you a Karen to look at the damage all the screen time on those phones is doing to these kids and seek some sort of solution.
So here’s what the bill does…
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Age Verification and Parental Consent: App stores must verify a user’s age and obtain parental consent before allowing teens under 18 to download apps, including popular platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram.
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Scope: The bill applies uniformly to all 1.5 million apps available on major app stores, avoiding targeting specific apps or content to mitigate constitutional concerns.
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Enforcement: The Louisiana Attorney General can impose fines up to $10,000 per violation, with a 45-day notice period for developers to correct issues.
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Implementation: App stores like Apple and Google, which already have age verification technologies, are responsible for compliance. The bill does not address scenarios where a child uses a parent’s pre-approved device, leaving such cases to parental discretion.
Other states – Utah, Ohio and Arkansas among them – have passed similar laws only to get them struck down in the courts on the basis that it’s a First Amendment violation to make certain apps available only to adults. And there’s an argument out there which says that age verification is a privacy violation.
Imagine that. Social media apps which exist almost completely for the purpose of data mining are all of a sudden interested in your privacy. They’re serious!
Louisiana’s bill puts the onus on app stores, and that’s a good way to go about it. Let’s face it, the vast majority of app store traffic runs through Google and Apple – it’s hardly a problem for either of those companies to come up with a non-intrusive way of verifying the ages of app purchasers/subscribers; hell, Google and Apple already know how old you are, not to mention a whole lot of other things about you that you’d rather not have anybody know. Simply make it a requirement of setting up an app store account that you verify your age, and there are multiple ways to do that, and the account itself then becomes the age verification which satisfies the law.
Or, if you’re under 18 but your parents are OK with you getting phone apps, then you can just work off their app store account.
We know that apps like TikTok are Gardens of Eden for groomers, pedophiles and Lord knows what other kinds of scum-of-the-earth people out to corrupt kids. Parents everywhere are terrified of what’s online waiting for their children, and that isn’t paranoia. But more than that, those apps train people to become dopamine junkies, and the results aren’t good.
Chris Williamson had a podcast with neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman not long ago, part of which covered this topic, and it’s not good…
Practically everything about cell phones is terrible for kids’ development. And the appmakers and app stores aren’t going to rein any of it in unless governments force them to.
Will a bill like HB 570 effectively do that? I don’t know.
But I do know that there are tons of stories of parents getting their kids a phone only to be appalled when that kid stops going outside, can’t put the phone down, wastes hours and hours playing mindless games or interacting with unvetted strangers on sketchy apps, or even worse finds a way to use Mom’s credit card to buy crap on Temu. I know one family which had half their bank account cleared out because the kids bought stuff online and took out expensive app subscriptions and made in-app purchases, and there were zero safeguards to doing any of that.
Sure, those were mistakes made by those parents, mistakes that will never happen again, but the point is it’s not unreasonable that a state government might want to step in and do something about Californian or Chinese or Russian app makers poisoning their kids with garbage or scamming them into spending their folks’ money. As app stores are the portals for these apps to make it onto the kids’ phones, it’s also not unreasonable to place the responsibility on them to mitigate what damage might come from kids diving into the phone-app muck.
Again, it’s not my favorite bill. But there’s nothing unreasonable about attempting to regulate something most people are starting to see as a problem that even good parents are struggling to overcome.
Tamny often has good takes. This might be his worst one yet.
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