A federal judge repeatedly cited Jenner & Block’s amicus brief in an order blocking California from enforcing a law that, among other measures, requires businesses to estimate the ages of online child users and configure privacy settings for them.
State legislators passed the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act last year. Signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom, the law was scheduled to take effect next July 1.
But NetChoice, a trade group whose members include Amazon, Google, Meta, and TikTok, sued last December to block the law. In NetChoice v. Bonta, the group argues that the act represents a “sweeping restriction that requires websites to try to determine their users’ ages and to restrict access to constitutionally protected speech.”
On behalf of Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, our team submitted an amicus brief supporting NetChoice’s motion for a preliminary injunction.
In granting that injunction on September 18, US District Judge Beth Labson Freeman noted from our brief that “the steps a business would need to take to sufficiently estimate the age of child users would likely prevent both children and adults from accessing certain content.”
Judge Freeman went on to write: “Further, as noted in Professor Goldman’s amicus brief, age estimation is in practice quite similar to age verification, and—unless a company relies on user self-reporting of age, which provides little reliability—generally requires either documentary evidence of age or automated estimation based on facial recognition.”
Jenner’s team producing the brief included Partners Jessie Amunson and Lindsay Harrison, Senior Paralegal Cheryl Olson, Manager of Docketing Services Tyler Edwards, and former associate Danny Li.
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