FSC Secures Amendments, Drops Opposition to AB 3080

Free Speech Coalition has dropped its formal opposition to California’s age-verification bill, AB 3080, after an amendment secured through months of discussions with the bill’s author was heard by the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

The bill originally required platforms to age-verify using a government ID, a non-prepaid credit card, or a system of designated-adult accounts. The amendment, heard today in the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, adds additional options for compliance with the age-verification mandate: 

(iv) Implementation of a system that does either of the following:

(I) Includes metadata or response headers identifying the product as sexually explicit to parental control software, embedded hardware applications, and other similar services designed to block, filter, monitor or otherwise prevent a minor’s access to inappropriate online content.

(II) Block users designated as minors by the operating system of the device used to access the website.

“The new language encourages compliance and acknowledges the work that the industry has done and will continue to do to prevent minors from accessing adult sites,” says Alison Boden, Executive Director of Free Speech Coalition. “We know that filters are far more effective at blocking adult content than platform-level verification, which has limited reach and is easily circumvented. We hope AB 3080 encourages device manufacturers to prioritize systems that can identify minor users so that adult sites can more effectively block them.”

This means that adult sites do not need to perform expensive and invasive age verification on Californians if they identify pages containing explicit content with a meta tag (or http response header) identifies it as such: <meta name="rating" content="adult" /> or <meta name="rating" content="RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA" />

The committee introduced additional amendments shifting enforcement to the state attorney general, rather than local prosecutors, and delaying the effective date until January 1, 2027. 

“While we still have concerns about some of the law’s provisions, we’ve formally withdrawn our opposition in response to the inclusion of the amendment,” says Boden. “We thank the bill’s author, Asm. Juan Alanis, his staff, and the members of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary for working with us to address our concerns and providing a solution that respects the rights of legal adult businesses and the privacy of consumers.”