The FTC has been reviewing the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act implementing Rule since 2010. In these comments, CDT and the ALA are responding to supplemental changes to the COPPA Rule that the FTC proposed in August 2012. While we acknowledge and support the FTC’s sincere effort to update the Rule to continue protecting children’s personal information online, we argue against two proposed changes that would dramatically expand the scope of sites covered under COPPA’s “directed to children” definition: applying COPPA obligations to third-party plugin developers whose code gets used on sites directed to children, and counting as “directed to children” sites that have “a disproportionately large percentage of children” in their audience. Both of these proposals are too vague to give operators and developers a clear understanding of their obligation under the law, and would create significant burdens on free expression and innovation.
On September 15, 2026, the Center for Democracy & Technology and Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus brief along with the Wikimedia Foundation in Meta Platforms v. Bonta, challenging California’s SB 976.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
Op-Ed: France’s Constitutional Council Ruling Tests the Limits of Social Media Bans
Read our analysis the legal and policy significance of the Constitutional Council’s decision on ongoing social media age restriction and age assurance debates ahead of the most-anticipated EU-wide approach on child online safety due by December 2026.
The brief explains that Section 230’s liability protections are essential to enable free expression online and they extend to the use of automated systems to engage to rank and order content as part of traditional publishing activities.
