The Supreme Court just handed parents a win over Big Tech, letting Texas enforce a law that requires app stores to verify ages and get parental consent before kids download apps — and the same companies that will deplatform you for questioning an election are suddenly screaming about the First Amendment.
The Texas App Store Accountability Act, enacted in 2025, requires app stores to determine whether users are adults and obtain parental consent for minors before they download apps or make in-app purchases. On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to block the law in an unsigned order with no noted dissents, leaving a 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in place that allowed enforcement while litigation continues.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association — whose members include Apple and Google — sued to stop the law, claiming it would have "profound consequences for the protection of digital speech." The trade group argued minors would be blocked from accessing "a book by Ernest Hemingway or J.K. Rowling, a Taylor Swift album, or a subscription to National Geographic," according to CNN.
Funny how the platforms that silence political dissent discover constitutional rights the moment states threaten their access to children's data.
Texas told the Court that when a minor downloads an app, they agree to contractual terms covering "whether the child's location will be tracked, whether the child's privacy will be protected, whether information from the child's phone can be sold by the developer, and whether the child waives the right to sue." Follow the money: kids are data goldmines, and parental consent requirements threaten the harvest.
A federal district court initially blocked the law in December, writing that it "prohibits minors from participating in the democratic exchange of views online," as NPR reported. But the conservative 5th Circuit reversed that decision in June, and the Supreme Court declined to intervene.
Texas argued the law regulates only "commercial speech" and is therefore less constitutionally protected, according to NPR. The law has limited exceptions — emergency services apps and college entrance exam platforms — but covers virtually everything else, including Instagram, library apps, and news organizations.
Utah, Louisiana, and Alabama have passed similar laws. The Supreme Court last year upheld a different Texas law requiring age verification for pornographic websites in a 6-3 ideological split, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing for the majority. But the Court has long treated children's access to pornography differently from other speech questions. The app store fight is broader and far less settled.
CNN noted that in a similar Mississippi case last summer, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that a social media age verification law was "likely unconstitutional" but said the companies hadn't "sufficiently demonstrated" they would be harmed by temporary enforcement. No such dissent appeared Monday.
The legal fight is far from over — Monday's order only means the law can be enforced while lower courts continue to hash out the constitutional questions. But the refusal of any justice to dissent is at least a tentative signal that the Court isn't buying Big Tech's free speech cloak.
The open question: will the courts ultimately treat app store gatekeepers as speech platforms entitled to full First Amendment protection, or as commercial intermediaries whose data-harvesting business model doesn't trump parental rights?
