Congress May Find Common Ground With Tech, Privacy Issues, Policy Experts Say
With Congress strongly divided along partisan lines, a few common issues unite the two parties, including children’s privacy, said lawyers and policy professionals during a panel Tuesday on the new administration at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Public Policy & Legal Summit.
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“On the tech policy point, we're in a bit of a reset stage,” said Akin Gump attorney Reggie Babin. “Everyone is trying to figure out … what the dynamics of the new Washington mean.”
Due to the growing appeal of populism on both sides recently, Babin said, “things like expanded child tax credits, or particularly the tech policy space, and … children's privacy and things that are aimed at protecting children and minors online are largely bipartisan.”
David Schwietert, a senior policy adviser at Akin Gump, said “privacy legislation at the federal level has been circulated for quite some time.”
“Now more than ever, there's certainly a case to be made for federal privacy legislation to happen,” he said. “But obviously in those intervening years, there's been a greater degree of effort at the state level because of the federal inaction. This is both good and bad” because it "highlights the importance of a unified standard at the federal level, presuming that agreement can be reached,” but “it also creates other challenges as it relates to kind of balancing all of those preemptive measures that states have otherwise constructed.”
But Babin said “the longer it takes, the harder it's going to get,” and he's skeptical that a federal comprehensive privacy law will be passed soon.
That's not the case for children’s privacy legislation. “I think this is an area where there is significant bipartisan interest,” he said. “There is demonstrated momentum, and I think there's a real chance that … one or two of these bills" -- like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act 2.0 or the Kids Online Safety Act -- "could be signed into law.”
Babin also said the Take It Down Act, which isn’t necessarily a privacy bill, is “in this same orbit of concern in Washington about the impact of technology on children and efforts to legislate around those concerns” and could be “an area that is very ripe for some type of legislative breakthrough.” The Act, S-146, was introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz (R) and would require companies to take down all nonconsensual sexual explicit material, including any AI-generated material, among other things.