The United States Senate Commerce Committee has unanimously advanced legislation that would radically reshape how technology companies handle children's data. COPPA 2.0 passed out of committee on 25 June 2025, marking another attempt to overhaul protections that have barely evolved since the original Children's Online Privacy Protection Act in 1998.
The bill's scope is ambitious. It would ban online companies from collecting personal information from users under 17 years old without their consent and ban targeted advertising to children and teens while creating an eraser button for parents and kids to eliminate personal information online. It also establishes a Youth Marketing and Privacy Division at the FTC.
Here lies the political logic: protecting children is not controversial. Senators celebrate the "broad, bipartisan commitment to protecting children and teens online". Yet for all the rhetoric, House passage remains deeply uncertain. This is the third year the Senate Commerce Committee has passed COPPA 2.0, but the House Commerce Committee passed it in September 2024 and it never received floor action.
The tech industry's resistance adds weight to the legislative logjam. Industry groups, whose members include Google, Meta, Reddit, Discord, TikTok and X, argue that the bill's data collection rules could force platforms to gather more information rather than less to avoid legal risk. The tech industry has warned that broad language and ambiguity could lead to smaller companies keeping the status quo while larger companies reduce legal risk by collecting more data to avoid missing underage users.
There is a genuine tension embedded here. Everyone agrees that children deserve privacy protections. The US Surgeon General found that social media can have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and wellbeing of minors, with one in three high school girls contemplating suicide in 2021. The bill responds to legitimate harms. But the mechanism matters enormously.
For Australian readers, this remains a foreign policy matter, yet instructive. Far-reaching preemption language could impact many state privacy laws that have been enacted in recent years; the House proposal takes a broader approach to preemption than the Senate framework, which largely maintains COPPA's existing preemption language. Even in America's federalist system, balancing national and state authority proves contentious.
The most likely outcome is stalemate. House Republican leadership opposed the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill that passed the committee in a kids package with COPPA 2.0, though House Republicans were not outspoken against COPPA 2.0 in 2024. Separating the bills might ease House passage, but only if leadership allows the vote. For now, Washington has a bill that everyone claims to support and no clear path to enact it.