Why Kosa is Bad

Posted on: Friday, August 1, 2025 at 05:21PM

In this article I just wanted to mention why KOSA (Kid’s Online Safety Act) would be bad for the internet if it’s passed. Just to make this available for those who prefer written articles and to have it be a more consistent link that can be shared.

First of all: I am someone who believes that children should be able to be safe online. But I know enough about the internet and technology in general to understand that over-regulation can harm the internet as well. So here goes.

Censorship

Parts of the bill are too vague and could be interpreted as “anything we don’t like” by the sitting administration at the time.

Such as Section 102 sub a item 2 , even though it is defined in Section 101 item 2 the term “mental health disorder” is not objective, and can mean information that may develop a dissenting opinion.

Love or hate it, this can lead to platforms over-censoring content lest they piss off a current sitting administration. This will result in the loss of some helpful internet resources over time.

Complexity

The internet is extremely complex. I don’t think that’s a secret for anyone. But adding a central identity requirement will make it infinitely more complex. That will increase outages over the long term and it will likely just keep getting worse as the central identity service takes on an identity of its own.

If the government were to control it

This in my opinion would be the worse case scenario. At the very least it could lead to the government being able to shadow ban anyone it disagrees with, including political dissidents. On the other hand you have the bureaucratic nightmare which comes from government initiatives that the government doesn’t feel is a priority.

So over time, this will decrease the reliability even worse.

If the private sector ran it

You would likely see a fee for implementing central ID requirements on your own website if you were to operate one. That includes small time blogs that allow comments. So this becomes a huge issue because it would become more expensive over time.

This problem would be exacerbated by the fact that it’d be a requirement. Just like how car insurance is a requirement in many places and its premiums are currently double what they were just four to six years ago.

Also over time the reliability may fluctuate because the company running it will likely try to cut costs, and sometimes mess up in doing so having to backtrack.

Blackmail

With either maintainer of this central identity system, the blackmail ability would likely increase. The reason why is it will likely keep track of which ID’s are accessing which sites. So if you access something shameful, like adult videos, and a malicious actor found out; they may opt to require you to do something for them lest they release the log files.