The House just passed the KIDS Act, and they managed to strip out the one provision that actually mattered. Duty of care is gone. Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), the two senators who spent four years building the Kids Online Safety Act, are now calling the House’s own bill dead on arrival. This is the same fight that has killed every version of KOSA since 2022, and it will keep killing every version until Congress stops trying to solve this problem from the wrong end of the pipe.Duty of care asks platforms to design their products responsibly for minors, but a duty only means something if you can enforce it, and it is impossible to do so if you cannot reliably tell who a minor is. Every fight over KOSA’s duty of care provision eventually collapses into the same argument: give platforms an open-ended obligation to protect children from harm, and either they ignore it because enforcement is toothless, or an FTC and a patchwork of state attorneys general use it to police lawful speech because the definition of harm was never pinned down. Critics on both the Left and the Right are worried about the same structural flaw: KOSA tries to regulate content and conduct without first solving the identity problem underneath it.That is where the App Store Accountability Act comes in, and why it deserves to be treated as the load-bearing half of this fight.