Texas Wants to Check Your App Store Papers
Smartphones are no longer just phones. For kids, they are libraries, newspapers, classrooms, cameras, maps, town squares, and, yes, bottomless distraction machines. Texas Senate Bill 2420 treats access to all of it as something that should first pass through a state-mandated checkpoint.
Also known as the App Store Accountability Act, SB 2420 is currently facing a major constitutional challenge before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The consolidated cases—Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT) v. Paxton and Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) v. Paxton—pit challengers against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and place the intersection of free speech and government regulation of technology platforms squarely before the court.
SB 2420 requires app stores to verify the age of every user and mandates that minors obtain individualized parental consent before downloading or purchasing any app.
Texas argues that the law merely strengthens parental authority. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas was unconvinced. As the district court explained:
The Act is akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door, and for minors, require parental consent before the child or teen could enter and again when they try to purchase a book.
The case is now on appeal before the 5th Circuit. The International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) filed an amicus brief supporting the plaintiffs and arguing that SB 2420 violates the First Amendment. The brief’s distinctive contribution is to connect First Amendment doctrine with an underlying law & economics framework, building on my prior ICLE issue brief, “A Coasean Analysis of Online Age-Verification and Parental-Consent Regimes,” as well as several earlier Truth on the Market posts examining app-store age-verification requirements.