FTC Pivots From Competition to Children

A Federal Trade Commission (FTC) summit last week on protecting children online previewed an odd pivot. Apparently, the agency wants to be a sort of family values advocacy group.

"This government-sponsored event was not a good-faith conversation about child safety—it was a strategy session for censorship," said the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), a trade group for the adult industry.

What stands out most to me about last Wednesday's event—called "The Attention Economy: How Big Tech Firms Exploit Children and Hurt Families"—is the glimpse it provided into how the FTC's anti-tech strategy is evolving and the way Republicans seem intent on turning a bipartisan project like online child protection into a purely conservative one.

From Protecting Competition to Protecting Children

Attacking tech platforms has become a core part of the FTC's mission over the past decade. During Donald Trump's first term as president, these attacks tended to invoke free speech concerns.

Whether the weapon of choice was antitrust law or changes to Section 230, the justification back then usually had something to do with the ways tech platforms were moderating content and the idea that this moderation was politically biased against conservatives.

Under President Joe Biden, the FTC continued to wield antitrust law against tech companies, but now the justification was that the companies were just too big. Democrats invoked "fairness" and the idea that they were restoring competition by knocking these big businesses down a peg.

The way the FTC attacks tech companies has become a window into the larger preoccupations and priorities of different political cohorts. And these days, it's going all in on being a conservative morality machine—in the name of protecting the children, of course.

Replace references to social media platforms and app stores with cable TV and video games—or rock music and comic books—and this workshop would have been right at home in any of the last few decades of last century. Even the old right-wing culture war stalwart Morality in Media was there, though the group now calls itself the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE).

In fact, most of the panelists came from conservative groups. In addition to the representative from NCOSE, there were folks from the Heritage Foundation, the American Principles Project, the Family Policy Alliance, the Ethics & Public Policy Center, the Family First Technology Institute for the Institute for Family Studies, and Hillsdale College. The speakers also included several Republican politicians and some Republican FTC commissioners.

The event barely pretended to be anything other than a right-wing values summit, with panelists laying out their vision for how the FTC and Congress can work together to put conservative values into law.

It Starts With Age Verification

"We have a God-given right and duty to question whether" social and technological change must be looked at with resignation and indifference, said FTC Chair Andrew N. Ferguson in his prepared keynote remarks.

Ferguson said that the FTC's job is to protect vulnerable consumers and that this includes children. Protecting kids online will inevitably involve everyone giving up more personal information, he suggested: "We must go beyond the current legal regime, which conditions unfettered access to online services on nothing more than an unverified, self-reported birthdate."

Going beyond self-reported age assurances means app stores, social media companies, adult websites, and all sorts of other web platforms checking government-issued IDs, using biometric data, or otherwise engaging in privacy-invading actions. That obviously will affect not just minors but almost everyone who uses the internet, requiring adults as well as kids to give up more personal information.

It's a funny agenda item for an agency ostensibly concerned with consumer privacy.

Panelists at the FTC conference seemed especially concerned with checking IDs for consumers of online pornography. "The topics of age verification and pornography came up many times over the course of the event," reports the FSC. "Throughout the event, FTC leadership and their allies made plain their intentions to spread unconstitutional age-verification policies nationwide and attack the adult industry's very right to exist."

But panelists expressed support for a wide range of federal legislation aimed at age-gating and censoring the internet, including:

The Kids Online Safety Act, which would require online platforms to "prevent and mitigate" all sorts of online "harms" to minors, from eating disorders to depression to risky spending.

The Shielding Children's Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net Act (SCREEN) Act (H.R. 1623 and S. 737), which would create a federal age-verification mandate for platforms that host content deemed "harmful to minors" (a category that includes all porn platforms but could also ensnare a good deal beyond that).

The App Store Accountability Act, which would require app stores to verify user ages and restrict downloads for minors who didn't have parental consent. "While framed as a child protection measure, the bill would force app stores to collect sensitive personal data like government IDs or biometric scans from potentially hundreds of millions of users, posing serious risks to privacy, threatening free expression, and replicating the same constitutional flaws that have plagued previous online age-verification laws," write Marc Scribner and Nicole Shekhovtsova, two policy analysts at Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this website).

The CASE IT Act (HR 573), a bill last introduced in 2023 that would take away Section 230 protections for porn websites that don't verify ages.

Whose Flourishing and Whose Good?

"There are ways to encode certain values into technological design," Michael Toscano of the Institute for Family Studies said on one panel."We have a responsibility as a political, social, and economic matter to ensure that technology is ordered towards human flourishing and the common good."

But Americans have many different ideas about what constitutes human flourishing and the common good. And policies mandating that tech companies take the "common good" into account are inevitably going to reflect the version of the common good envisioned by those in power at the time.

The idea of human flourishing and common good envisioned by those in favor at the FTC right now seems to recognize few rights and little agency for anyone under the age of 18. In his keynote, Ferguson envisioned a world where the government gives parents total control and surveillance over their children's online activities.

"Parents should be able to see what messages their children are sending or receiving on a particular service," he said. "And most importantly, parents should be able to erase any trace left by their children on these platforms, at all levels of granularity, from individual messages to entire accounts."

The idea of human flourishing and common good envisioned by those in favor at the FTC right now also leaves little room for adults' sexual freedom.

"From bizarre, unscientific claims about porn addiction to denials that the First Amendment protects sexual content, many of the speakers used the spotlight to slander and malign the adult industry," noted the FSC. "The FTC also made it clear that they plan to test the limits of their authority, including by expanding their use of Section 5 of FTC Act (which prohibits 'unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce') to go after targets they disfavor."

The idea of human flourishing and common good envisioned by those in favor at the FTC right now doesn't seem too keen on free markets either.

FTC Commissioner Mark Meador went on an extended rant comparing tech companies to tobacco companies and calling individual choice a smokescreen for "ever-greater corporate power."

The FTC's current anti-tech agenda is explicitly rooted in socially conservative moral values and explicitly hostile to free speech and free markets. It might have a different flavor than the Biden FTC agenda, but it won't be any better for business freedom or for individuals' civil liberties.

Followup: The OneTaste Victim That Wasn't

During closing statements last week in the case against former leaders of the orgasmic meditation company OneTaste, the government showed the jury pictures of the alleged victims—including a picture of a woman named Madelyn Carl. One government attorney mentioned Carl more than two dozen times in her closing. But Carl had not testified as a government witness, and was in fact in the courtroom that day to support defendants Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz.

"I do not see myself as a victim of OneTaste, or Nicole Daedone, or Rachel Cherwitz," said Carl in an emailed statement. "Both of those women have helped me in immeasurable ways, and I would be devastated if they got convicted."

"My story is my story," she continued. "Obviously it did not fit the government's narrative, so they did not call me as a witness. I joined the OneTaste community by choice, and I remained in the community until I decided it was time for me to move on."

The FBI did interview Carl about her time at OneTaste. Afterward, agents prepared a report about the interview that "mischaracterized things I said" and "reframed my story in a misleading way," according to Carl. She also said the FBI offered to pay for therapy if she went through an FBI victim specialist:

In the summer of 2022 I reached out to one of the other witnesses for a reference to a therapist but then ultimately ended up declining because the offer that I got back was not something I was interested in. The offer was that the fbi would put me in touch with a victim specialist and pay for my therapy. She said they had offered to pay for her therapy retroactively and would do the same for me. I declined because I didn't want to use a victim specialist. Or process my issues with the fbi. Because I didn't feel like a victim.

Carl isn't the only woman involved with OneTaste who feels the FBI tried to paint as a victim despite her objections. Reason talked with two other women—Alisha Price and Jennifer Slusher—who felt pressured by the FBI to say they were victims. You can read their stories here.

More Sex & Tech News

• The "big beautiful break between Trump and Musk" signals Silicon Valley's wider disillusionment with the Trump administration, writes Yascha Mounk.

• "A recent ruling from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is raising the stakes for any business that operates a website collecting user data," reports The National Law Review:

In Briskin v. Shopify, decided in April 2025, the court held that California courts can exercise personal jurisdiction over an out-of-state company—Shopify—for allegedly collecting personal data from a California resident without proper disclosure or consent. This decision signals a significant shift in how courts view digital jurisdiction in the age of online commerce and widespread data collection.

• How Hollywood studios are quietly using AI.

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