AI Summary
5 min readCongress Wants to Track Every Device You Own — and the bill in question doesn’t just apply to phones and laptops. It could reach your car, your refrigerator, and your washing machine. That’s the warning from Laz Piper and Peter Van Valkenburgh of Coin Center, who recently published a piece titled “The Correct Term for Age Verification is Censorship.” They joined Taylor Lorenz to explain how the proposed Digital Age Assurance Act could quietly restructure the internet, force open-source developers to rewrite their code, and create a legal slippery slope that starts with age and ends with government-approved gatekeeping of who can access what information online.
What the bill actually does
The Digital Age Assurance Act, introduced in the U.S. Senate, requires operating system developers to build mechanisms into their software that allow users to indicate their age and date of birth. That signal can then be distributed to apps and online services. Importantly, the bill does not mandate full age verification upfront — it only requires that the operating system have a way for users to indicate their age. Actual verification kicks in only if there is “clear and convincing evidence” that the user lied.
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What you'll learn
- 1 Congress Wants to Track Every Device You Own
- 2 (02:10) **The Digital Age Assurance Act Introduced** - A new Senate bill would require operating system developers to build age-determination systems into their software
- 3 (03:34) **What the Bill Actually Requires** - OS providers must build age indication signals, not necessarily full verification
- 4 (04:11) **Scope: Every Device With an Operating System** - The bill's broad definition could cover phones, computers, cars, and even smart appliances
- 5 (05:31) **The Overcompliance Problem** - Companies will likely demand intrusive ID verification to avoid liability
- 6 (07:26) **How This Threatens Open Source Software** - Linux and other open source operating systems have no single company to comply with these mandates
- 7 (09:53) **Linux: Publicly Available, No User Relationship** - The bill fundamentally conflicts with how open source software is distributed and used
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
A New Law That Could Destroy Open Source Forever
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The US Senate recently introduced the Digital Age Assurance Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that could fundamentally alter how every operating system and internet-connected device works.
Under the guise of "protecting children online," this bill threatens to mandate ID verification directly into operating systems (not just social media or the internet, but operating systems themselves). This would impact everything from smartphones to PCs to open-source software like Linux. Obviously, this has huge implications for privacy, free speech, and the future of open-source development.
On this week's Free Speech Friday, I sat down with Laz Pieper and Peter Van Valkenburgh from Coin Center to break down their viral Substack piece, "The Correct Term for Age Verification is Censorship." We dive deep into how turning open-source coders into regulated service providers violates First Amendment rights, how mass identity verification systems are dangerous, why the line between safety mandates and government surveillance is disappearing so fast, and what we can do to stop this law.
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