Children’s Online Safety: Congress’s Well-Intentioned Efforts Will End Badly

Smart government requires lawmakers to balance competing goods: liberty and order, privacy and security, fiscal responsibility and necessary spending, among many others. Two such goods are child welfare and parental prerogatives. Government, at all levels in America, has traditionally allowed parents wide latitude, interfering only in cases of glaring and severe abuse.

When regulating the digital world, many policy-makers and pundits have determined that America’s legal and societal norms ought not apply. This is true for issues of free speech, economics, privacy, and, now, parental rights. This new coalition seeks to impose on families its own conception of responsible online behavior. As the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia wrote regarding a similar effort to regulate video games in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011), while this agenda “may indeed be in support of what some parents . . . actually want, its entire effect is only in support of what the State thinks parents ought to want.”

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About the Author

David B. McGarry

David B. McGarry is the research director of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance and Taxpayers Protection Alliance.

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Smart government requires lawmakers to balance competing goods: liberty and order, privacy and security, fiscal responsibility and necessary spending, among many others. Two such goods are child welfare and parental prerogatives. Government, at all levels in America, has traditionally allowed parents wide latitude, interfering only in cases of glaring and severe abuse.

When regulating the digital world, many policy-makers and pundits have determined that America’s legal and societal norms ought not apply. This is true for issues of free speech, economics, privacy, and, now, parental rights. This new coalition seeks to impose on families its own conception of responsible online behavior. As the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia wrote regarding a similar effort to regulate video games in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011), while this agenda “may indeed be in support of what some parents . . . actually want, its entire effect is only in support of what the State thinks parents ought to want.”