CCIA Presses Federal Court to Block Texas Age-Verification Law
Texas gives no good reason for a federal court to uphold the state’s app store age-verification law, the Computer & Communications Industry Association said Thursday.
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“Texas does not, and cannot, provide any good reason why this court should be the first to uphold an across-the-board age-verification and parental-consent mandate for a restriction on access to fully protected speech,” CCIA said in a reply brief at the U.S. District Court for Western Texas.
CCIA last month sued Texas over the app store age-verification law, which is set to go into effect on Jan. 1. In case 1:25-cv-01660, the tech association argued the law was unconstitutional and should be blocked (see 2510160034).
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) defended the law in an opposition filing Nov. 7. “Implementing age verification at the app store level … improves the safety of Texas children without the use of personal identifying information such as facial scans or biometric markers,” said Paxton.
“CCIA incorrectly claims that much of what is covered by [the contested law] is speech,” added Paxton: Rather, the law “regulates conduct, not content, and applies to all contracts minors may wish to enter on an app store.”
CCIA replied Thursday that Texas “raises no justiciability issues, nor does it argue that [the Texas law] is unfit for a facial First Amendment challenge.” The state’s argument that the law’s “age-verification and parental-consent mandates do not implicate speech at all … contradicts settled law, including the Supreme Court’s decision in” this year’s Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton (see 2506270041), “which applied intermediate scrutiny to a narrow age-verification law targeting only obscene speech unprotected as to minors.”
However, Texas “does not even try to argue that its blunderbuss restrictions on access to a vast universe of speech protected for minors and adults are tailored to its broadly stated goals,” CCIA said.