[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 124 (Tuesday, July 30, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5562-S5566]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                         Kids Online Safety Act

  Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I come here today to talk briefly on 
the Kids Online Safety Act before the milestone, historic vote that we 
will take at about noon today.
  For years--in fact, for decades--Congress has discussed and debated 
the need for reform and safeguards on the internet. We have held dozens 
of hearings, brought Mark Zuckerberg and every other Big Tech CEO to 
our committees, and there has been broad agreement: Something needs to 
be done. We need rules, safeguards. Despite countless polls showing 
public bipartisan demand for legislation, nothing has happened, 
nothing.
  Senator Blackburn and I began working on our subcommittee when we 
held legislative investigations on kids' online safety. Throughout that 
process, we began to meet with parents who have lost their children 
because of social media's harms from bullying, fentanyl, sex 
exploitation, and other horrific harms.
  As a parent of four children and Senator Blackburn also as a parent, 
we felt deeply the grief, but we admired the grit and the grace of 
those parents who came to us and demanded action.
  I am haunted by one of the moms who said to us early on, I think 
speaking on behalf of so many of them and us:

       When will you stop them from killing people? When will you 
     stop them from killing our children?

  Voting today, the U.S. Senate is finally taking action on Big Tech.
  At its core, the Kids Online Safety Act is a simple, straightforward 
measure. It gives young people and parents the tools and safeguards to 
take back control over their online lives. It gives them that measure 
of power. It empowers them. It enables them to make choices about what 
they want to see and hear on the internet rather than the algorithms 
that drive content--often repetitive, addictive content--about bullying 
and eating disorders that contributes to the destruction of their 
lives.
  There are three key principles in this legislation: accountability, 
safeguards, and transparency.
  First, social media platforms will be bound by a duty of care, 
legally required to exercise reasonable care to prevent their products 
from causing self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, and 
other harmful impacts.
  The duty of care is flexible because we wanted to keep up with the 
changes in technology and to be able to be fairly applied to companies 
with widely different sizes, business models, and products.
  We recognize the obligations on Instagram or YouTube should be 
different from those for a startup and that social media platforms are 
different from video games.
  Second, social media platforms will have to provide young people 
safeguards and set them to the strongest settings by default.
  Finally, social media companies will no longer be able to hide harm. 
This legislation will require yearly independent audits and access to 
data. Researchers, Congress, and parents all will be able to hold those 
companies truly accountable.
  Importantly, this bill stops Big Tech from avoiding their legal 
obligations to protect children. We do that through the knowledge 
standard in the bill.
  The bill ensures that if Meta or Google know or should know that a 
user is a teen or a child, they need to provide them the safeguards 
under this legislation. Where the platforms have information indicating 
that they are kids, they need to act and protect them--no more sticking 
their heads in the sand, no more excuses, no more platitudes that 
disguise inaction and irresponsibility.
  In short, we want kids to have more of the good that comes from the 
internet without the bad. There are a lot of positives. Kids experience 
it, but there is some really scary, toxic stuff that kids also 
experience. And they have told us again and again and again they want 
to make choices. They don't want the algorithms to do it for them. That 
is why we have empowered them to make those choices. We are not 
blocking or censoring content for them. We are simply creating an 
environment that is safe by design.
  At its core, this bill is a product design bill. All my career, I 
have tried to protect consumers against defective

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products that are designed to make more money and more profits at the 
risk or expense of injury to people. Whether it is cigarettes that are 
designed to kill the customer through nicotine addiction or car 
manufacturers that have been required to make their products safer by 
design through seatbelts and airbags or toys with small parts that 
endanger children who can choke on those parts unless there is 
sufficient warning to parents or caregivers, this society steps forward 
to make products safer, putting people, and particularly children, over 
products. That is what we are requiring social media to do.
  We can no longer rely on the Big Tech companies to say to us: Trust 
us. They have betrayed that trust, and Congress has an obligation to 
act.
  Over the past 3 years, we have worked exhaustively to improve this 
bill. We have sought feedback. We have made changes. We have revised 
and crafted new provisions. We have robustly debated the issues with 
anyone and everyone who had concerns.
  I am immensely grateful to Senator Blackburn, who has been 
incomparably important as a partner, as a cowriter and drafter of this 
legislation, as an advocate because we share this common goal. Whatever 
our differences on other issues, this goal has been paramount for both 
of us over these past 3-plus years.
  I want to also thank Senators Schumer and McConnell for scheduling 
this vote and Chair Cantwell and Ranking Member Cruz for their 
leadership and support for this bill in the Commerce Committee. The 
Kids Online Safety Act now has 72 cosponsors--nearly three-quarters of 
the membership of this Chamber. That is unheard of for an important, 
substantive piece of legislation that takes on the most powerful 
companies in the world.

  Looking ahead, I am confident that we can build on this momentum--it 
is powerful momentum, but we need to build on it--and we can swiftly 
pass the Kids Online Safety Act in the House and enact it into law this 
fall as kids come back to school. Legislators will be returning from 
their home districts having heard from those parents and children, just 
as we have heard here, about the dangers and destruction coming from 
the internet. Senator Blackburn and I have spoken with the House 
leadership several times, and I believe we have strong support and a 
clear path forward.
  Through this long process, our leaders--indeed, our loadstar--has 
been those parents and young people. They are in the Gallery today for 
the vote, and across the country, they are watching. Our Nation is 
watching because the parents of this Nation--not just the advocates and 
activists who came here to meet with Senators before now and, soon, 
Congresspeople, but all of the parents of this Nation who have a stake 
in the safety of our children--are demanding this change. They are 
demanding the Kids Online Safety Act because they know firsthand the 
heartbreak and loss that social media can cause. We can't bring back 
the lives of their loved ones, but we can save others.
  These parents are heroes: spending countless hours living through the 
pain, telling and retelling their stories, bringing tears to our eyes, 
as the majority leader, Senator Schumer, has said so eloquently. He has 
felt that pain through them, through their eyes and through their 
hearts, and I particularly want to thank Senator Schumer for keeping 
his word and giving this bill a vote, keeping not only his word but 
keeping faith with those parents. Congress owes them, and I am honored 
to fight alongside them.
  Today the Senate will show that it understands we are in the midst of 
a mental health crisis in this country, particularly for our young 
people, that is aggravated and exacerbated by Big Tech. And the reason 
is, very simply, a business model that, in effect, relies on repetitive 
addictive features driving toxic content at kids.
  They want back control over their online lives. Parents are asking 
for tools and safeguards that give them a measure of control. Clearly, 
the need is so deeply and widely felt in this country, and the Senate 
today shows that it values the lives of young people over the political 
influence and the profits of Big Tech.
  The armies of lawyers and lobbyists that it has been able to muster, 
the false pretenses of ``Sure, we want regulation but not that 
regulation,'' will finally be defeated. It is a historic day. It is 
time to vote.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
  Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, I thank my colleague, while he is 
still here on the floor, for his diligence and his work and his 
partnership as we have worked on the Kids Online Safety Act. Indeed, he 
has put many hours, as his team has also put many hours, into this.
  As we get ready to move forward with passage, I think we have to 
remember that it was 1998 the last time this body took up and passed a 
bill that became law that protected children in the virtual space. And 
a lot has changed since then. We have seen the emergence of social 
media. We have seen 100 million Americans born during that period of 
time.
  So thinking about these platforms and that emergence, when you think 
about Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok and online video 
games, those interactive games that are pulling kids into those, you 
think about how social media has changed the lives and the exposure of 
children today. They have grown up in this.

  And, as Senator Blumenthal said, Mr. President, it is so important to 
note that there are laws that protect children from buying alcohol, 
buying tobacco, buying pornography, being taken to a strip show. We, as 
a society, have decided kids can't drive until they are 16 years old 
and they can't vote until they are 18 years old. But when you look at 
the social media platforms, there are no guardrails, and children are 
constantly exposed--constantly exposed--to content that encourages 
self-harm.
  That is why we have started to see, over the last decade, such a rise 
in cyber bullying. I had one mom tell me her child was bullied to 
death--cyber-bullied nonstop. I had a principal tell me--he said: You 
know, Marsha, it is interesting. Previously, in previous decades, 
children could go home and get away from the schoolyard bully. Now, 
that takes place over that phone, and it never stops.
  Indeed, many of the behavioral issues at school are related to what 
is happening online. And we have seen a rise in mental health 
disorders. We have seen an increase in eating disorders, online sexual 
abuse, human trafficking, drug overdoses in teens, and of course, 
suicides--online challenges where a child loses their life. And we have 
seen how, the way Big Tech approaches this, our kids are basically 
defenseless.
  That is why the Kids Online Safety Act has moved forward, as Senator 
Blumenthal said. We have worked on this. We have met with colleagues. 
We have met with wonderful parents. We have met with principals and 
pediatricians and so many people that are involved in children's lives. 
That is why this legislation is focused on safety by design. And that 
is a change. That will be a change for social media. It will have that 
duty of care. There will be that toolbox for kids and parents to make 
it a safer environment. Those algorithms are going to have to be opened 
up. There is going to have to be a portal so bad actors in the virtual 
space can be reported, and the social media platforms will have to do 
something about it.
  When we started focusing on these issues and doing our hearings, what 
became so evident to us, social media platforms knew. They knew that 
what they were doing and what they were allowing was causing harm. They 
knew it because the whistleblowers from those companies told us they 
knew it. But, you know what, they were putting profits before children. 
So they did it anyway. They did it knowing they were harming our 
children.
  But children are not a product when they are online. That is the way 
social media has treated them. Indeed, Meta assigned a value to each 
child. That child is worth $270 a year to that company. That is the 
callous nature with which they have approached this.
  So we are ready to move forward with this today, and we do thank the 
parents who have shared their stories with us and have done more. They 
have advocated. They have worked. They have pulled neighbors and 
friends and those who work with children into a coalition. It has been 
pretty powerful.

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  So we are ready to move forward with this, and we do thank Senator 
Blumenthal and his team. We thank the other Members of the Senate, the 
70 cosponsors that are on this legislation with us. We thank Leader 
Schumer and Leader McConnell for their work. Commerce Committee 
Chairman Cantwell and Ranking Member Cruz all have been supportive of 
moving this legislation. And it is, indeed, a testament to building 
consensus around bipartisan solutions that are going to last.
  We also thank all of the groups and organizations that have worked 
with us to make certain that this legislation gets across the finish 
line. And as we pass it today and send it over to the House, we know 
that we have Chairwoman McMorris Rodgers and Congresswoman Kathy Castor 
and Congressman Bilirakis. Castor and Bilirakis are the House leads on 
this legislation. There is broad bipartisan support in the House, and 
we know that the House leadership is supporting it. And we are ready to 
move this across the finish line and to the President's desk so that as 
kids head to school this year, they know they have new tools in the 
toolbox to protect themselves as they are in the virtual space.
  Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I rise in support of the Kids Online 
Safety and Privacy Act, a bill that includes an amended version of the 
Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens Online Privacy 
Protection Act. I commend the bill's sponsors, Commerce Chair Cantwell, 
Leader Schumer, and members like Senator Wyden and the many outside 
advocates for children, civil rights, and privacy who have helped 
improve the bill to the version we are voting on today. I also 
appreciate the parents and students who have shared their experiences 
with me, particularly those who have turned great pain into advocacy to 
protect children.
  While the internet is an invaluable tool for connecting people, 
disseminating information, and fostering an exchange of ideas, it can 
also be exploited to spread misinformation, harvest personal data, and 
prey on society's most vulnerable. The complex landscape can be 
especially difficult to navigate for young people, who deserve the 
freedom to access information and express themselves online but can 
also be subject to bullying, targeting, and privacy violations.
  I had concerns about the Kids Online Safety Act as originally 
introduced, particularly provisions that could have permitted political 
censorship of content and falsely categorized basic information as 
dangerous or harmful. The bill before us today focuses instead on 
design elements to protect children online, including restricting 
features that encourage compulsive use, ensuring more transparency 
about how platforms use personalized recommendation systems and allow 
users to opt out of those systems, and providing optional tools that 
can help parents manage their child's online experience while 
protecting young people's access to information. I became a cosponsor 
of the Kids Online Safety Act after these changes were included, 
strengthening the legislation while, in turn, preventing unintended 
consequences.
  Congress will also have an obligation to ensure that the Federal 
Trade Commission implements this bill as intended, with clear guidance 
to platforms on how to comply with the law without restricting First 
Amendment-protected content or limiting privacy protections. I believe 
this legislation is a balanced approach to the serious challenge of 
protecting young people online, but will carefully monitor its 
implementation and effects to ensure it remains targeted to prevent 
harm.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
  Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that this article 
on the history of privacy protections for children and teens from 
Common Sense Media be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From Common Sense Media, July 29, 2024]

   When It Comes To Protecting Kids' Privacy, Call Us the Energizer 
  Bunny--We Just Won't Quit When It Comes To Protecting Kids' Online 
              Privacy, but We're Almost at the Finish Line

                         (By Ariel Fox Johnson)

       For 14 years, Common Sense Media has been trying to get 
     Congress to update the one federal law that protects 
     children's privacy online: the Children's Online Privacy 
     Protection Act (COPPA). We have fought to extend COPPA's 
     protections to teenagers, since it only covers kids under age 
     13 today, and to ban targeted advertising that pushes 
     unwanted products on kids. Congress has been a tough place to 
     pass anything when it comes to kids and tech.
       Our privacy advocacy began during the rise of the 
     smartphone and mobile technology. And it has continued into a 
     new age of biometrics, virtual reality, and the rise of AI. 
     Children are living in a world of constantly increasing 
     surveillance and data collection, and the stakes could not be 
     higher.
       We have been working alongside champions like Senator Ed 
     Markey (D-MA), who passed COPPA into law in 1998 and 
     introduced his first effort to update it, called the Do Not 
     Track Kids Act, in 2011. He reintroduced it, or a version of 
     it, every two years, and we supported him every time. It was 
     lonely work. You can see our 2012 call to action, our 2013 
     blog post, and our 2019 call to action. We filed comments 
     with the executive branch (2014 NTIA comments) asking for 
     privacy for teens and more protections against targeted 
     advertising. And we've filed many comments since then. We 
     testified before Congress twice (2021 testimony one and two), 
     always asking for updates to this foundational law. In the 
     interim, while Congress did nothing, we turned to the 
     states--playing the lead role in taking ideas from COPPA 
     updates and getting them turned into laws such as 
     California's Eraser Button (2013), the California Consumer 
     Privacy Act (CCPA) of 2018, the Maryland Online Data Privacy 
     Act (2024), and the New York Child Data Protection Act 
     (2024).
       Ever since we started to advocate for children's privacy, 
     concerns about this issue have grown across almost every 
     corner of the country. Sen. Markey has co-authored his COPPA 
     update bills with Republicans every time, including Sen. 
     Cassidy (R-LA) this year. And he has worked in both the House 
     and the Senate on the same issues. In 2022, the bill passed a 
     key committee, the Senate Commerce Committee, but then 
     nothing else happened.
       Until now.
       In 2010, we called COPPA ``woefully out of date.'' On July 
     30, 2024, the U.S. Senate finally approved COPPA 2.0 as part 
     of a larger bill that also addresses one of our other top 
     priorities, social media health and safety for kids and 
     teens. Congress is now the closest it has been in 25 years to 
     finally updating privacy laws for kids. The next step is to 
     get the U.S. House of Representatives to agree with what the 
     Senate did this summer. We haven't rested over the past 14 
     years--and we won't until this job is done.
       This story is a lesson in how hard it can be to get 
     Congress to do the right thing. It's also a testament to our 
     commitment to sticking with our mission to ensure a healthier 
     digital world for all kids. The wait has been long and hard, 
     and Congress's refusal to act has been inexcusable. But we 
     are confident that the wait and the work will be worth it.

  Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, today is a historic day. Today the U.S. 
Senate will vote on the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act, which 
includes my legislation with Senator Bill Cassidy from Louisiana, the 
Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act, COPPA 2.0.
  With this vote, the U.S. Senate will finally send a message to Big 
Tech that the days of indiscriminately tracking and targeting children 
and teens are over in our country; that their privacy-invasive business 
model must change; that young people and their parents are more 
important than shareholders' bank accounts.
  This vote is long overdue. On June 20, 1996--June 20, 1996--more than 
28 years ago, at the dawn of the information age, when only birds 
tweeted and ``the gram'' was simply a measurement, I stood before the 
House of Representatives and warned about the internet's unique threat 
to user privacy.
  I stated then, in 1996, that the internet would allow corporate 
America to have the ``opportunity to track the clickstream of a citizen 
of the Net, to sneak corporate hands into a personal information cookie 
jar and use [that] database to compile sophisticated, highly personal 
consumer profiles of people's hobbies, buying habits, financial 
information, health information, who they contact or converse with, 
when and for how long.'' The internet would allow ``digital desperadoes 
to roam the [internet] frontier unchecked.''
  Two years later, Congress enacted my Children's Online Privacy 
Protection Act, or COPPA--that was 1998--and it was for kids under the 
age of 13. That is all I could get in 1998--protections for kids under 
13, in our country--knowing that there was going to be an effort by 
corporate America to exploit those children.
  Now, how did I know that? I knew it because I had been chairman over 
telecommunications in the 1980s, when the

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television industry was targeting kids with advertising on Saturday 
morning cartoons, Saturday morning programs.
  They were pretty much turning all the programs into one big ad 
targeted at vulnerable kids. And so I had to author the Children's 
Television Act of 1990 in order to put protections for television on 
the books. But then, as the internet evolved, the marketers, the 
targeters all moved over from television over to the internet. And with 
it, Congress has to follow them in order to pass the laws to protect 
children, to protect teenagers from being exploited by the very same 
marketers, the very same companies that sought to exploit them on 
television.
  And as I explained back then, the original COPPA, or the Children's 
Online Privacy Protection Act, can be summarized in three words: 
``disclosure,'' ``knowledge,'' and ``no''--disclosure of privacy 
policies, knowledge of information collected on our children, and no to 
the sale of the information. That information should only be used for 
the purposes for which the young person and their family had intended 
it.
  So COPPA put real safeguards on the internet, at least for kids under 
the age of 13. But over the last 26 years, the Federal Trade Commission 
has brought dozens of cases against both household names, like Google, 
TikTok, and even Mrs. Fields Cookies, and lesser known entities. And 
during that period, the Federal Trade Commission has collected over 
half a billion dollars in fines for violations of COPPA, of the 
Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.
  The original COPPA law has done a lot of good. But as the years have 
passed and technology has evolved, our online world, once again, 
started to look like the Wild West with the desperadoes in charge, 
exploiting teenagers, exploiting children, using algorithms--powerful 
algorithms--to target those kids.
  So, in 2011, I introduced my children and teens' privacy bill to 
update COPPA. And in every Congress since, I have continued to 
introduce that legislation, slowly developing coalitions, answering 
questions, building support to modernize and update COPPA to protect 
children and teens' privacy online.
  And it can no longer be under the age of 13. Now we have to move it 
up to age 16 because we can see very clearly the targeting that goes on 
by these companies, the exploitation of the young people in our 
country, and the vulnerability of that group of Americans under the age 
of 17 who, according to the Surgeon General, according to the CDC, are 
in a mental health crisis in our country. And social media has been 
implicated by the Surgeon General, by the CDC, as one of the principal 
causes of this mental health crisis in our country.
  And while knowledge and disclosure and no may have been effective 
during the early internet era, today, that formula needs to be 
modified. The no must now be no, no, no; and that is the foundation of 
COPPA 2.0--no targeted advertising toward children and teenagers in our 
country, no excessive data collection of information of teens and 
children, no deliberately ignoring young users.
  For over a decade, I have been fighting for these essential privacy 
protections. In fact, if COPPA 2.0 were a person, it would have just 
turned 13 and would have aged out of COPPA's critical privacy 
protections, and that is unacceptable.
  I introduced it in 2011, but the power of those tech industries has 
blocked that progress that we needed. Yes, you want all the good things 
from the internet, but there is a Dickensian quality to the internet. 
It is the best of technologies and the worst of technologies 
simultaneously. It can enable; it can ennoble. But it can also degrade; 
it can debase.
  And we must put these protections in because we know that these 
companies have been exploiting their ability to reach children and 
teenagers all across our country and, largely, unencumbered by any 
restrictions whatsoever.
  I know that privacy can sometimes seem as an elusive concept because 
strong privacy rules sound great in theory, but what does that mean in 
practice? Well, with COPPA 2.0, here is what privacy is going to mean: 
It is going to mean privacy will put an end to the manipulative, 
personalized ads that trick young people into purchasing unwanted goods 
and services.
  Privacy means stopping a search engine or social media site from 
collecting a teenager's eye color or location or other information 
which has nothing to do with why that young person had gone online in 
the first place. It is none of that company's business.
  And it also means giving teens or parents an eraser button to delete 
a social media post--to tell the company: ``Delete all that information 
you have gathered about me, a teenager''; or, as a parent, ``that you 
have collected about my child. Erase it all.''
  And that right will be in the hands of the young person. It will be 
in the hands of the parent to just say: No, stop it. Stop collecting 
that information and delete whatever you have. Erase it.
  So there will be an eraser button so a youthful mistake doesn't last 
forever.
  So that is going to be a big home run, too, when we pass this 
legislation, to move the power over to the parents and to the young 
people. And, most importantly, privacy means a fighting chance for 
parents and young people who are struggling against trillion-dollar 
platforms looking for every way to keep kids and teens on their app.
  Today, with passage of COPPA 2.0, the Senate takes a momentous step 
to stand up to the Big Tech lobbying machine; to stop the privacy-
invasive business model that exploits young people for profit; to give 
our high-tech regulator, the Federal Trade Commission, the tools to 
tame our modern, digital desperadoes who are out there trying to 
exploit young people in our country.
  With AI supercharging Big Tech's algorithms and encouraging platforms 
to collect more data on young people, it has never been more important 
to protect our young people's privacy. With this vote, the Senate is 
finally meeting that moment.
  When I was a boy and I was home with my mother and with my two 
brothers--and I would be 10 years old, 9 years old--a salesman would 
ring the doorbell, and my mother would tell me: Just go to where the 
letter opener is in the door and tell the salesman that your mother is 
not home.
  And I would. And then I would go to my mother and say: But you are 
home.
  And she would say: I am not home to him. He is not getting in our 
living room. It is 11 in the morning. We are not having a stranger in 
our living room with you and three small children. It is just not 
happening.
  Well, that same sense of privacy is still present in American 
families, in America's mothers and fathers. They don't want strangers 
in their living rooms, in their kitchens, in their bedrooms, with their 
children.
  And what has happened is that, in the internet age, those same 
salesmen have been able to get around that front door. They have been 
able to get into the lives of the children, of the teenagers in our 
country, in ways that the parents have had great difficulty in 
controlling.

  And so what we are going to say here today on the floor of the Senate 
is no. We are going to change this balance of power. We are going to 
hand it over to the parents, hand it over to the children and the 
teenagers, so that we can just say to those salesmen, those digital 
salesmen, those digital desperadoes trying to take advantage of young 
people in our country: No, you cannot get in. You cannot compromise the 
well-being of the young people in this family.
  So that is what this vote is all about. It is historic. It is long 
overdue. It was pretty clear what the business model of these companies 
was going to be long ago at the dawn of the era.
  I was the Democratic author of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 
that moved America from analog to digital, from narrowband to 
broadband. Not one company in America had broadband in February of 
1996, but it was all predictable.
  The pediatricians in our country said: We must put protections in for 
this new digital world in 1996.
  So it was highly predictable.
  Those who cared about the well-being of children, of teenagers were 
saying it all back then. Nothing is new.
  So today is a historic day, and we thank all of our partners for 
working

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with us and all of the outside groups who have dedicated their time, 
their effort, their resources to getting this bill to the Senate floor.
  I am deeply grateful to Senator Schumer for his partnership and 
leadership on this issue, to Chairwoman Cantwell, to Ranking Member Ted 
Cruz, and to my partner Senator Cassidy from Louisiana. In 1998, COPPA 
1.0 was a partnership between myself and Billy Tauzin from Louisiana, 
and, today, with Senator Cassidy, we are going to take COPPA 2.0, 
partner it with the legislation of Senator Blumenthal and the Senator 
from Tennessee, and we are going to make history. And then we are going 
to get it over the finish line and onto the President's desk before the 
end of this year.
  So I thank all the Members for their cooperation on this, and, again, 
I want to thank Senator Schumer for his great effort in expediting the 
movement of this legislation to the floor and for, I believe, its 
inexorable, inevitable passage.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, well, today is a momentous day. The 
Senate keeps its promise to every parent who has lost a child because 
of the risks of social media.
  Today, after a lot of hard work, twists and turns, the Senate is 
passing two vital pieces of legislation with a strong bipartisan vote: 
the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, and the Children and Teens' Online 
Prevention Act, or COPPA.
  By passing KOSA and COPPA, we are one step closer to the most 
important update in decades to Federal laws protecting kids on the 
internet.
  Once we act, the House should pass these bills as soon as they can.
  This is such an important piece of legislation, and I say to my 
colleagues who have worked hard--Senators Blumenthal and Blackburn, 
Markey and Cassidy, Durbin, Klobuchar, Chair Cantwell, and others--
thank you.
  But thank you, above all, to the parents who advocated so tirelessly 
for these bills. I have sat with them. I have heard the terrible 
stories--children, teenagers, perfectly normal. Some algorithm captures 
them online by accident, and they end up committing suicide shortly 
thereafter. I have heard those stories. Can you imagine being a parent 
and living with that?
  So we have to do something. And these parents have turned their grief 
into grace. These parents are the reason that we succeeded today. Today 
the Senate tells the parents: We hear you. We are taking action.
  I am so glad that we have a broad bipartisan vote here. It shows the 
Chamber can work on something important; that no one let partisanship 
get in the way of passing this important legislation.
  But this is a historic moment. This is a moment when the Senate has 
said: There have been horrible abuses. We must end them, and we will.
  I yield the floor.
  I ask unanimous consent that the scheduled vote occur immediately.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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