This is a guest opinion column

Last week, the Alabama House and Senate held hearings on the App Store Accountability Act, which would require app stores to age verify their users and acquire parental permission any time a child tries to download or purchase an app. The Senate has already resoundingly passed the bill out of committee.

This is a pro-parent bill. Nearly 90% of kids own a smartphone, where millions of apps are available through the app store. The app store is a child’s doorway into the galaxy of the internet, with all the dangers that it entails. Surely a bill that gives parents the power to say yes or no on behalf of their child to specific apps should be seen as pro-parent, pro-child, and pro-family.

But that’s not how some lobbyists who oppose the bill see it. For them, the parents are the problem—not Big Tech, not bullies or predators, just parents. Here’s what NetChoice lawyer Justin Hill said in his testimony against the bill: “I just want to say that companies do a great job of protecting children online, right? There’s been a breakdown around the country involving tech and children, and that breakdown primarily has been parents.”

According to NetChoice, Apple and Google’s mouthpiece, parents are to blame. Full stop. It’s not trillion-dollar smartphone giants who hold a powerful app store duopoly who are to blame for the chaos that their devices have introduced into the lives of our kids. The fault lies with us parents.

Apple and Google’s contempt for parents isn’t new.

As the former director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation for 14 years and executive director of the Institute for Family Studies, respectively, we have both spent years trying to get these companies to update their parental controls to put parents in the driver’s seat. We have also both long argued Apple and Google fail to provide parents sufficient information “about potential risks from their products.”

For years, they have refused to prioritize safety as their loop-hole-ridden parental controls indicate—and not because they lacked the ability. It was only after several states like Alabama introduced legislation that Apple caved and announced new parental controls. It’s a step in the right direction, to be sure. But it ultimately falls short because parents still won’t have final say over what apps their kids can download.

Parental controls are just not prioritized – meaning parental authority and child safety, quite evidently, are the last things on Apple and Google’s minds.

Recently, Meta, X, and Snapchat have publicly supported this legislation. Lobbyists have tried to use this fact as a weapon to sink it. As fierce critics of Meta in the past, we never thought we’d

be on the same side as any of these companies related to child safety, but welcome anyone backing this common-sense solution. This legislation makes sense because Apple and Google already have the capacity to verify the ages of users – they already input their age during setup.

During the hearing, Representative Ernie Yarbrough, owner of a small app development business, said “I completely understand.” Setting up the family plan of a smartphone “is hard” for grandparents and parents, “who feel so unprepared to deal with something they feel is really important.” This bill, he suggested, would make it easier for them to guide the online experiences of their kids.

It wrongly appears Apple is keeping above the fray in Alabama. In reality, a lobbyist representing the App Association has been opposing this legislation across the country while claiming to represent small app developers. In reality, the App Association has been exposed as a front for Apple, deriving “more than half its funding” from Apple, who takes a steep 30% cut from app developers they claim to represent.

Parents don’t need contempt. They need help. In response to years of getting the cold shoulder from these smartphone giants, NCOSE and IFS have joined with more than 50 child advocacy organizations to form the Digital Childhood Alliance, which is calling on lawmakers states across the country, including Alabama, to pass common-sense app store accountability legislation.

Apple and Google can ignore parents. Lawmakers shouldn’t.

Michael Toscano is executive director of the Institute for Family Studies and director of the Family First Technology Initiative.

Dawn Hawkins is Senior Advisor of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.