Check bill, but Congress plays hall monitor

Colorado amendments could exempt open source OSes, code repos, and containers
The prospect of OS-level age checks applying to open source systems is a serious concern for FOSS advocates.

Campaigners appear to have secured proposed exemptions for open source operating systems, code repositories, and containers in one US state, but stricter federal legislation has already been introduced in Congress.

This story has been developing for some months now: we first reported on this new legislation in early March, and the following week on Richell's campaigning efforts .

Later that month, we reported that systemd had added code to store user ages .

In that story, we also reported on the independent TBOTE Project , which is investigating the funding of the lobbying efforts and the relatively new conservative pressure groups pressing for the laws, such as the Digital Childhood Alliance (founded in 2025).

TBOTE echoes Bloomberg's reporting : Meta appears to be a major financial force behind recent age-verification lobbying.

On Tuesday, in a Mastodon post , Richell reported:
Richell, whose company is based in the Colorado state capital of Denver, added in a follow-up comment :
With the way this worked out, I believe we now have a sound template to start working in other states.

I haven't found the amended text online but will post as soon I do.

Our next step is a letter to the CO reps that we need to pass the bill with these amendments, then adapting that letter to other states and working with the open source community to raise awareness.

So far, so good.

As we reported in March, there are similar bills in Colorado, California, New York, Illinois, Louisiana, Texas, and Utah – as well as in the nation of Brazil.

Similar legislation has now been introduced at the federal level.

The United States Congress is considering H.R.8250 - Parents Decide Act : a bill that would require operating system providers to verify users' ages, require parental verification for minors, and support parental consent controls.

"H.R." here denotes the House of Representatives , the lower house of the US Congress ; the upper house is the US Senate .

OSNews notes an important difference in this bill:
If passed, the bill would require actual age verification , instead of mere voluntary age reporting that current state-level bills cover.

For any US readers who want to do something about it, one potential place to start is this Reddit thread , which contains links for how to find your representative and a template for a letter to send to them.

It does seem to the Reg FOSS desk that the root cause here is the owners of online services not wanting to bear the responsibility for their users and the content that they post and read.

If social networks were obliged to have robust age verification, and users were compelled to use their real names, real faces, and bear full legal responsibility for their actions, then there would be much less reason to try to pass the buck on to the vendors of the tools used to access those online services.

If the FOSS desk were running the show, we might start by repealing the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Section 230 , which "provides limited federal immunity to providers and users of interactive computer services."
Of course, this might require verified names and validated ID everywhere, and armies of content moderators nearly as numerous as the users.

It might even effectively put all the big social networks out of business.

But we're sure there might be some downsides as well.

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