Summary
In our testimony against SB 1747, NetChoice argues that the bill’s age verification requirements for online platforms are a well-intended but deeply flawed approach that would fail to withstand judicial review. Like its counterpart HB 2991, SB 1747 infringes on the right to receive information and has the potential to stifle innovation by forcing companies to focus on compliance rather than effective safety tools. We point out that existing tools already allow parents to set content restrictions and monitor usage without the privacy risks inherent in state-mandated data collection. The risks of data breaches and the erosion of constitutional freedoms far outweigh the bill’s potential benefits.
NetChoice Testimony in Opposition to Arizona SB 1747
February 18, 2026
Arizona Senate
Committee on Regulatory Affairs and Government Efficiency
1700 W. Washington St.,
SHR 109
Phoenix, AZ 85007
Dear Chair Bolick, Vice Chair Carroll and Distinguished Members of the Committee on Regulatory Affairs and Government Efficiency:
NetChoice respectfully asks that you oppose SB 1747, which requires online platforms to verify all users’ ages and obtain parental consent for certain minors. If enacted, this bill would almost certainly violate Arizonans’ First Amendment rights, weaken their privacy and fail to keep kids safe.
NetChoice is a trade association of leading internet businesses that promotes the value, convenience and choice that internet business models provide to American consumers. Our mission is to make the internet safe for free enterprise and free expression.
We share the sponsor’s goal to better protect minors from harmful content online. NetChoice members have taken the issues of children’s and teen safety seriously and, in recent years, have rolled out new features, settings, parental tools and protections to better empower parents and help them monitor their children’s use of social media. We ask that you oppose age verification proposals and instead focus on proposals that more effectively protect young people online without violating the constitutional rights of every Arizonan of any age.
Age Verification–whether at the app store level, device or website-level raises constitutional issues—and is now being litigated in other states.
The Supreme Court and other federal courts have ruled that age verification mandates that block access to the exercise of First Amendment rights are unconstitutional. Age verification laws have recently failed to withstand legal scrutiny in several states. NetChoice has secured permanent injunctions against such censorious laws in Arkansas, Louisiana and Ohio (See NetChoice v. Griffin, Western District of Arkansas (2023) https://netchoice.org/netchoice-v-griffin/, NetChoice v. Murrill, Middle District of Louisiana (2025) https://netchoice.org/netchoice-v-murrill-louisiana/ & NetChoice v. Yost, Southern District of Ohio (2024) https://netchoice.org/netchoice-v-yost). Implementing such a measure in Arizona would likely meet the same fate and lead to costly legal challenges without providing any real benefits to the state’s residents.
As Federal Judge John W. deGravelles noted in granting a full injunction against Louisiana’s age restriction law, “‘It is . . . well established that the [Free Speech Clause] protects the right to receive information and ideas,’ Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557, 564 (1969), because ‘the right to receive ideas follows ineluctably from the sender’s First Amendment right to send them’ and is necessary for the recipient’s own ‘meaningful exercise’ of First Amendment rights, Bd. of Educ., Island Trees Union Free Sch. Dist. No. 26 v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853, 867 (1982) (plurality opinion). Even minors ‘are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection’: ‘[O]nly in relatively narrow and well-defined circumstances may government bar public dissemination of protected materials to them.’ Erznoznik, 422 U.S. at 212–13. Although States “possess[] legitimate power to protect children from harm, . . . that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed'” (NetChoice v. Murrill, https://netchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Louisiana-MSJ_Granted.pdf).
Beyond its First Amendment violations, SB 1747 is unconstitutional under the Dormant Commerce Clause because it regulates behavior and activities that take place outside of Arizona. The law also imposes requirements on websites for the use, tracking and storage of information about their users who are under the age of 18. These requirements conflict with COPPA, a federal law that governs how websites handle minors’ data. Therefore, SB 1747 also violates the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.
Given the legal landscape, SB 1747’s age-verification and parental-consent requirements cannot survive judicial review. Unlike regulating access to physical products no one has a constitutionally enumerated right to buy (cigarettes, alcohol), requiring ID (or similar “identity-based” burdens) for accessing lawful speech violates the First Amendment rights of adults, minors and businesses alike. “Age-verification schemes,” a federal district court recently held in enjoining Arkansas’s similar age-verification requirements, “are not only an additional hassle, but they also require that website visitors forgo the anonymity otherwise available on the internet” (NetChoice v. Griffin, https://netchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Court-Permanently-Halts-Arkansas-Age-Verification-Law_NetChoice-v-Griffin_Mar -31-2025.pdf).
Age Verification proposals undermine parental authority.
Poorly-designed age verification laws not only face legal challenges, but also encroach upon parents’ long-established prerogatives in guiding their children’s upbringing and online activities. Many online platforms have already implemented robust parental control features. For example, some online platforms have led the way with suites of tools for parents and teens to better protect themselves.
Additional parental controls are available at the browser, device and ISP level. For example, iPhones and iPads already empower parents to limit the time their children can spend on the device, choose which applications (e.g., YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat or Instagram) their children can use, set age-related content restrictions for those applications, filter online content, and control privacy settings. Market-driven innovation allows for diverse solutions that address different needs and preferences.
Moreover, if onerous requirements are forced onto social media platforms, minors will quickly shift their use to sites at the fringes of the internet, circumventing the protections the law aims to establish. This highlights the ineffectiveness of platform-level verification as a comprehensive solution.
Simply put, a one-size-fits-all government mandate will give users a false sense of security and will flatten the offerings for youth safety that are currently provided by the private sector. It would stifle innovation in this space and potentially reduce protections for Arizonan youth, as traffic shifts away from platforms operating in good faith and as companies focus on compliance rather than developing more effective, tailored solutions.
Age Verification proposals would put Arizonans’ private data at risk, leaving them vulnerable to breaches and crime.
Mandating age verification creates immediate privacy and cybersecurity liabilities for users. Age verification systems require collecting and storing sensitive personal data, potentially including government-issued IDs or biometric information. This not only contradicts the bipartisan aim of improving data security but also creates a new target for cybercriminals, potentially putting Arizona consumers at risk of identity theft or other forms of fraud. As we know from recent experience, any time there is a store of sensitive information it becomes a prime target for identity thieves and other nefarious individuals.
Age verification technology remains unproven and insufficiently secure. There are countless examples of high-profile hacks of concentrated collections of sensitive data, from the federal Office of Personnel Management (Sciutto, Jim, “OPM government data breach impacted 21.5 million,” CNN, July 10, 2015) to health insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act (Mandler, C., “Following a ‘significant’ breach, DC Health Link user data is being sold on the dark web,” CBS News, March 8, 2023). Concentrating sensitive data creates a bullseye for bad actors. Age verification systems create such a target, demonstrated by the recent hack of an age verification system used in Australia to verify and store the information of adults accessing physical locations with age restrictions, such as bars (Kidd, Jessica, “Cybercrime detectives arrest man following alleged data breach involving more than 1 million NSW clubs customer records,” ABC News, May 1, 2024). The requirements of SB 1747 would necessitate creating caches of sensitive data, including personal identification, of all Arizona users, regardless of their age.
A quarter of minors become a victim of identity fraud or theft before their 18th birthday (25 percent of kids will face identity theft before turning 18. Age-verification laws will make this worse. – R Street Institute (2024)). The problem is even worse for minors in foster care and child welfare systems. Identity fraud incidents can affect a young person’s credit reports, holding them back on the path to financial stability. Age verification mandates stand to make this problem a catastrophe.
Conclusion
While age-verification proposals are well-intended, NetChoice strongly believes that the drawbacks outweigh potential benefits. We respectfully urge the committee to reject this unconstitutional and ineffective approach. Instead, we encourage fostering private sector innovation in parental controls and youth safety tools. NetChoice members remain committed to protecting minors online through empowering parents, educating users and working with policymakers to develop more effective and constitutional solutions to address concerns about underage access to sensitive content or services.
We want to be a resource to discuss these issues in further detail, and we appreciate the opportunity to provide the committee with our thoughts on this important matter.
Sincerely,
Patrick Hedger
Director of Policy
NetChoice (The views of NetChoice expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of all NetChoice members.)
NetChoice is a trade association that works to protect free expression and promote free enterprise online.