Orchard today welcomed a wave of state bills requiring app stores to check the age of anyone downloading an app. The bills, which Orchard and its search-default benefactor Booble have spent the season helping to shape, would also bar private lawsuits over how the checks are carried out. Enforcement would be left entirely to state attorneys general.
"Children deserve a safe digital childhood, and we deserve a predictable one," the company said. "These bills deliver both, in that order of importance."
“A private right to sue is a lovely idea for people who have never had to maintain a checkpoint. An attorney general has a budget, a term limit and a fundraising calendar. We find that a workable counterparty.”
What leaders are saying
"Age verification is a problem of tolerances," said Miles Torquewell, Orchard's chief executive, who confirmed the legislative roadmap is his. "We have narrowed the gap between a child and a compliant download to well under a millimetre. The gap between a parent and a courtroom is now several states wide." He then glanced toward the front row and said he had no further verbs.
Graham Whitfield, the executive chairman who has stepped back to a better seat, was more direct. "A private right to sue is a lovely idea for people who have never had to maintain a checkpoint," he said. "An attorney general has a budget, a term limit and a fundraising calendar. We find that a workable counterparty."
Arjun Devraj, chief executive of Booble, which also runs a store and also supports the bills, said the company was "aligned on outcomes where outcomes are mutually understood to be aligned." Asked which outcomes, he said the question was being carefully considered.
Benefits
For families, the bills create a single, trusted place where a child's age is collected: the store. App Bazaar, which already stands at the entrance of every app, will now also stand at the entrance of every birthday. Developers who want to know a user's age may ask the store, which will answer for a fee it describes as simply being the 30 percent.
For regulators, enforcement is centralised and dignified. A complaint about a faulty age check will no longer arrive as thousands of inconvenient individual cases. It will arrive as one letter, from one office, after a long and cordial conversation about the company's good intentions.
For Orchard, the legislation provides clarity. A duty that once might have been tested by any parent with a grievance and a lawyer is now a duty tested only by someone who has to choose, among every other priority in the state, to test it.
For privacy, the age data collected will be protected with the same rigour as the company's famous advertising about protecting data. Orchard has pledged that any information gathered for age checks will never be used for anything it has not yet thought of.
The inevitable…
Once age checks are law and enforcement sits with a handful of state offices, the store will be both the only place that knows who is a child and the only party entitled to explain what it did about it. The first settlement, announced after a cordial conversation, will include a modest fee, an extended compliance period and an enhanced age-verification feature available in the next oPhone, in a new colour.
Check back October 2027