- Texas App Store Liability Enforcement Hit by Two Lawsuits
- Plaintiffs argue the law violates the First Amendment
- Texas’ age verification law is scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2026.
A student journalist, a high school debater, a student advocacy organization, and a consortium of Big Tech giants walk into a room. No, this isn’t the start of a joke – they’re all trying to stop Texas’ new age verification law from going into effect.
Scheduled to go into effect on January 1, 2026, Texas’ App Store Accountability Act will require official app stores to conduct mandatory age verifications of anyone in the state before allowing them to download mobile apps.
Teenagers would also be banned from downloading any app or make an in-app purchase without parental consent. In turn, parents must verify their identity to provide consent for each download or purchase.
According to the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), these requirements violate the First Amendment “by preventing app stores from offering lawful content, preventing users from seeing that content, and requiring app developers to talk about their offerings in a way that pleases the state.”
Students Committed to Advancing Texas (SEAT) agrees with Big Tech on this point and has filed a similar lawsuit. “Students have just as much right to access information as adults, and this law denies them that access,” said Cameron Samuels, co-founder and executive director of SEAT.
The Texas legislation is one of several age verification laws enforced across the United States in the name of children’s online safety. Although mandatory age checks have caused people to turn to the best VPN apps to avoid sharing their sensitive information, it’s not yet clear whether using a VPN could be a viable option for Texans.
How Texas Age Verification Rules Could Affect Citizens
The CCIA, which represents Apple, Google and Amazon, described the proposed rules as a “misguided attempt to protect minors” that seeks to go further than current parental control systems, since it requires everyone (not just minors) to prove their age before they can do anything in app stores.
Users can do this by uploading a valid government-issued ID to the platform. Yet creating such a database of sensitive information raises privacy and data security concerns, experts warn, because it can become a target for hacking or abuse.
But that’s not all. “The Texas App Store Accountability Act imposes a broad regime of censorship on the entire universe of mobile applications,” warns the CCIA in its lawsuit.
Indeed, the law goes well beyond social media apps or adult-only websites, which are the target of most age verification laws in the United States. It will age limit all kinds of apps, including educational, news, and creative apps like Wikipedia, Coursera, Spotify, and the New York Times, potentially hindering minors’ ability to learn, communicate, and express themselves.
Yet, “the First Amendment does not allow the government to require that adolescents obtain permission from their parents before accessing information, except in discrete categories like obscenity. The Constitution also prohibits restricting adults’ access to speech in the name of protecting children,” said Ambika Kumar, lawyer for student organization SEAT.
“This law imposes a system of prior restriction on protected expression that is presumed to be unconstitutional,” she added.
Can a VPN help?
As mandatory age verification spreads across the Internet, users in the United States and abroad are using VPN apps to bypass these controls.
Whether they’re doing this to protect their most sensitive personal data or are minors looking to escape scrutiny, it’s hard to know for sure – it’s most likely a mix of the two.
What’s important to know here is that a virtual private network (VPN) can spoof a user’s IP address to make them look like they’re browsing the internet from a completely different location in no time.
As we saw during the brief US ban on TikTok, a VPN may not be a quick workaround when restrictions are imposed at the App Store level. It will depend on how the restrictions are ultimately implemented.
At this point, however, the question also remains whether the complaints will succeed in knocking down Texas’ new age verification requirements before they officially take effect.
