Senate Bill 26-051 reflects that pattern. The bill does not directly regulate individual websites that publish adult or otherwise restricted content. Instead, it shifts responsibility to operating system providers and app distribution infrastructure.
Under the bill, an operating system provider would be required to collect a user’s date of birth or age information when an account is established. The provider would then generate an age bracket signal and make that signal available to developers through an application programming interface when an app is downloaded or accessed through a covered application store.
App developers, in turn, would be required to request and use that age bracket signal.
Rather than mandating that every website perform its own age verification check, the bill attempts to embed age attestation within the operating system account layer and have that classification flow through app store ecosystems.
The measure represents the latest iteration in a series of Colorado efforts that have struggled to balance child safety, privacy, feasibility and constitutional limits.
Not every parent is a good steward or guardian of their children, like those who have been caught cyberbullying their own children or those who send their gay/trans children to conversion camps to “pray the gay away” or even parents who deny their children life-saving vaccination and medical procedures because it conflicts with parental beliefs. A technically proficient parent who is “protecting their kids” could easily be blocking their children from access to information that is important to the child’s development just as much as the government could be.
The argument that it’s always fully the parents right and no one else’s is an unintentional argument in favor of parents treating children like property and normalizing the ability for parents to abuse and control their children under the guise of the false idea that a parent always knows what is best for their child. Plenty of parents shat out kids while knowing fuck-all about how the world works and definitely don’t know what is best for their child.
Government is imperfect, but so are parents.