Adequately Tailoring Age Verification Regulations

TL;DR

This paper analyzes U.S. age verification laws and methods, proposing an analytical model to interpret 'adequate tailoring' and evaluating technical approaches, highlighting practical challenges and tradeoffs.

Contribution

It maps current U.S. age verification legislation, introduces a novel analytical model for interpreting 'adequate tailoring,' and evaluates technical methods and their tradeoffs.

Findings

Mapped U.S. age verification laws

Proposed an analytical model for 'adequate tailoring'

Analyzed technical approaches and tradeoffs

Abstract

The Supreme Court decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton upheld the constitutionality of Texas H.B. 1181, one of the most constitutionally vulnerable of these age verification laws, holding that it was subject to and satisfied intermediate scrutiny and the requirement that age verification regulations be "adequately tailored". However, the decision leaves unresolved practical challenges. What is the current state of age verification legislation in the United States? How can "adequate tailoring" be interpreted in a way that is accessible to non-legal experts, particularly those in technical and engineering domains? What age verification approaches are used today, what infrastructures and standards support them, and what tradeoffs do they introduce? This paper addresses those questions by proposing an analytical model to interpret "adequate tailoring" from multiple perspectives with associated governmental goals and interests, and by applying that model to evaluate both current state laws and widely used verification methods. This paper's major contributions include: (1) we mapped the current U.S. age-verification legislative landscape; (2) we introduce an analytical model to analyze "adequate tailoring" for age verification and potential application to other online regulatory policies; and (3) we analyze the main technical approaches to age verification, highlighting the practical challenges and tradeoffs from a technical perspective. Further, while we focus on U.S. State laws, the principles underlying our framework are applicable to age-verification debates and methods worldwide.