NetChoice, a prominent tech industry group, has filed its 10th lawsuit against a state internet regulation, this time targeting Maryland's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act. The group claims the law, aimed at protecting kids from inappropriate online content, is an unconstitutional speech code in disguise and violates the First Amendment.

NetChoice has a track record of successfully challenging similar regulations, including a landmark Supreme Court case in Florida and Texas, where it argued that content moderation is protected by the First Amendment. The group's latest lawsuit opposes the Maryland law's reporting requirement, which it alleges allows regulators to subjectively determine what is in the "best interests of children" and invites "discriminatory enforcement."

The Maryland law, similar to a California law of the same name, requires tech companies to file reports about their services' impact on kids. NetChoice argues that this provision essentially mandates tech companies to "disparage their services and opine on far-ranging and ill-defined harms" that could arise from their services' design and use of information. The group points out that both California and Maryland have passed separate online privacy laws, suggesting that lawmakers know how to write laws to protect online privacy when they intend to do so.

Supporters of the Maryland law claim that legislators learned from California's challenges and "optimized" their law to avoid questions about speech. However, NetChoice maintains that even well-intentioned attempts to protect kids online are likely to backfire. The group's Litigation Center director, Chris Marchese, argues that the law essentially leaves tech platforms with a no-win decision: collect more data on users to determine their ages and create varied user experiences or cater to the lowest common denominator and self-censor lawful content that might be considered inappropriate for its youngest users.

Marchese also worries that collecting more data to identify users as minors could create a "honey pot" of kids' information, creating a different problem in attempting to solve another. The issue of age verification has already come before the Supreme Court this term in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, a case dealing with a Texas law that seeks to impose age verification requirements on sites with a high proportion of sexually explicit content.

While the outcome of that case could significantly impact content that might be considered legally harmful to minors, Marchese emphasized that NetChoice's lawsuit involves speech that is lawful to access at any age. "NetChoice, and our industry, fully agree that minors need to be protected online," says Marchese. "But ultimately, we don't achieve that outcome by passing unconstitutional bills into unconstitutional laws. An unconstitutional law protects no one, especially minors."

The NetChoice lawsuit will test the Maryland law's changes, such as avoiding an "express obligation" to determine users' ages and defining the "best interests of children." The outcome of this case will have significant implications for the tech industry and online regulation, as NetChoice continues to push back against what it sees as overreaching and unconstitutional laws.