WASHINGTON—A pair of special interest groups filed petitions last week for potential certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) in a bid to temporarily prevent the enforcement of a Texas law that requires age verification at the app store level.
Note that both cases are separate complaints but argue similarly that the age-verification law targeting app stores violates the First Amendment.
These attempts come just over three years after adult industry trade group the Free Speech Coalition and the parent companies of the world's largest adult tube sites filed a lawsuit against Texas for similar legislation requiring website-level age checks for adult entertainment platforms.
Central to the current petitions, brought by a student activist group called Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT) and a technology industry trade group called the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), were requests that the conservative Supreme Court issue an emergency stay of enforcement of Senate Bill (SB) 2420.
“Texas’s law would force the public to document age and identity in order to access lawful information," said Matt Schruers, president and CEO of the CCIA. "Users should not have to provide ID to download a Bible app or the New York Times, but Texas requires just that.
"The First Amendment protects the rights of app stores and app developers to disseminate lawful speech to users who have an equal right to access it," he added. "Parents—not governments—should retain the ability to make decisions about their children’s use of technology.”
SB 2420, also known as the App Store Accountability Act, was adopted by the GOP-held Texas state legislature last year and entered force in January 2026.
Similar in design to Texas House Bill (HB) 1181, which requires age verification for porn sites, the bill targets online mobile app marketplaces like the Apple App Store and Google Play to require age gating over popular social media apps—including X, TikTok and Instagram—as well as mobile games.
But SB 2420 is not as narrow as HB 1181, observed adult industry attorney Lawrence Walters in an email to AVN.
"The new law is not limited to restricting sexual materials that the state deemed harmful to minors," Walters explained. "This law restricts minors from accessing a vast amount of constitutionally protected speech which has not been proven harmful to children."
He added, "The Fifth Circuit’s decision to whitewash these restrictions by claiming they apply only to commercial speech is not supported by First Amendment precedent."
SB 2420 defines a minor as any individual under the age of 13. It is broad by design, per an AVN analysis of the bill.
The bill is broadly written because it has a core objective to regulate entire digital ecosystems at a systematic scale, rather than targeting narrow categories of content, as in the Free Speech Coalition case.
This casts such a wide net that app store developers and publishers cannot evade it. Corey Silverstein, another adult industry attorney, said that the new law is clearly problematic.
"Now Texas is attempting to move that same verification model far beyond adult content," Silverstein noted. "The app-store law requires age verification for essentially every user and parental consent before minors can download apps or make in-app purchases.
"Rather than targeting access to sexually explicit material, it places the verification obligation at the gateway to the entire app ecosystem," he said.
"SCOTUS should reinstate the stay that was wisely granted by the district court to allow for full consideration of the constitutional issues before the law is enforced," agreed Walters.
The legal challenges against the app store law are similar to those made by adult entertainment industry stakeholders and civil liberties organizations in the litigation of Free Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxton. But the expansive nature of SB 2420 offers a clear burden on freedom of expression for types of speech that are even non-controversial.
While there is not yet any indication as to whether Justice Samuel Alito will grant the requests of SEAT and the CCIA, the debate on age verification at the high court is extant and a hot-button topic, now, for all digital industries, regardless of the type.
Note that Justice Alito decides whether cases from the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals are heard by the nine-person high court.
He serves as the "circuit justice" for the Fifth Circuit. A panel of judges for the Fifth Circuit, based in New Orleans, Louisiana, lifted an initial stay on the enforcement of SB 2420 granted to the suing organizations by a federal district court in Texas in an effort to allow litigation to advance and reach a clear conclusion.
But the notoriously conservative Fifth Circuit sided with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, saying that SB 2420 can be enforced despite the ongoing litigation. This is a similar progression of events to those in the Free Speech Coalition case. Silverstein additionally told AVN that he is feeling a sense of "deja vu."
"The similarity is obvious: both laws rely on age verification, parental involvement, and the state’s interest in protecting minors online," Silverstein said. "But the contradiction is equally striking. In HB 1181, Texas argued that age verification was justified because users were seeking access to a narrowly defined category of adult content.
"Here, Texas is requiring age verification before access to countless apps that have nothing to do with sexual material," adds Silverstein. "Critics have argued that this is the digital equivalent of requiring every bookstore customer to show identification before entering, regardless of what they intend to read."
He concluded, "The legal question for the Supreme Court may ultimately be whether the reasoning that sustained House Bill 1181 can be expanded indefinitely. If age verification is constitutional for adult websites, does that automatically justify age verification for app stores, social media platforms, and eventually broad segments of the internet?"
Ultimately, the adult entertainment industry and the mainstream tech industry face a similar question on the front of addressing age verification laws across the United States.
Alison Boden, the executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, told AVN that the recurrence of the age verification issue before the Supreme Court is "extremely predictable."
"It was extremely predictable that courts would use age verification for adult content as the constitutional wedge to open the door to age verification for all manner of disfavored speech," Boden said. "It’s too bad that groups like CCIA and their members didn’t have the foresight to realize it."
