After watching the House Energy & Commerce hearing on “protecting kids online,” I was reminded that Congress is debating the wrong crisis. Congressional leaders spent hours discussing platform design tweaks, age-verification schemes and so-called “duties of care.” Still, not one moment was spent discussing the only thing that actually protects children: arresting sexual predators and putting them in jail.
The government cannot lecture about child safety while ignoring the basic math of this emergency. Last year, electronic service providers filed more than 20 million CyberTipline reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children; 13 million of those came from Meta. Think about that: a private company calling 911 13 million times. And law enforcement bodies, starved of personnel, training and digital forensics capacity, answered only a fraction of those calls.
Every expert knows this bottleneck is not detection. The bottleneck is investigation, prosecution and incarceration. Until Congress funds the people who actually put predators behind bars, these hearings are unfortunately performative.
Lawmakers in the 119th Congress have been revisiting a familiar slate of bills (KOSA, COPPA 2.0, RESET and their legislative cousins) that promise online safety but deliver none. They create new liabilities, new bureaucracies, new mandates and new censorship risks. Everything except the one thing that matters: taking predators off the street.
Not one of the bills discussed includes serious law-enforcement funding. There was no mention of codifying or expanding the vital work the DHS Cybercrimes Unit has done. Not one suggested disseminating their Know2Protect public awareness program, a free, readily available tool for parents, kids and schools. Not one expands the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces. None of them gives the U.S. marshals the digital forensics teams they need. Not one modernizes NCMEC’s overwhelmed systems.
None of these bills aims to solve the core problem: the near-total impunity that online predators enjoy.
These bills repeat the same misguided assumption that has distorted this debate for years: the idea that the federal government should become America’s digital parent.
Parents — not Congress, a state legislature or a city council — decide when a child is ready for a phone, a platform or a social-media account. When Congress tries to override that principle, which has been enshrined in federal and state law for decades, it does two things: it undermines families, and it creates a massive surveillance and data-collection regime that criminals will inevitably exploit.
In October 2024, nearly 70,000 Discord users had their driver’s licenses, IP addresses and private messages dumped online after a third-party age-verification vendor was breached. Last year, one of the largest verification companies in the world, AU10TIX, left its login credentials exposed for 12 months, meaning anyone with a browser and bad intentions could have accessed the selfies and driver’s licenses of users across Uber, TikTok and X. The idea that private companies should hold onto this data or hire another one to do it for them is just not reasonable in this current environment.
Predators worldwide are watching the House Energy & Commerce hearing and breathing a sigh of relief because they get another year of freedom. Another year to exploit, coerce, extort and re-victimize children. Another year where millions of CyberTips go unassigned, uninvestigated, unanswered.
Absolute child safety is not mysterious. We know what works: funded investigations, trained prosecutors, digital forensics teams, and a criminal-justice system capable of acting on the leads tech companies already provide.
That is why Stop Child Predators supports reintroducing the Invest in Child Safety Act. It is the only proposal that would shrink the predator population rather than expand the federal bureaucracy. Everything else proposed in Congress is noise. None of it gets a single offender off the street.
With 2025 coming to a close and a new year around the corner, an election year no less, Congress has a choice: It can keep producing laws that do nothing except generate headlines … or it can finally do the one hard thing that would protect kids. Arrest predators. Prosecute predators. Incarcerate predators.
Because the truth is simple: If your “child-safety” bill does not fund law enforcement, it is not a child-safety bill. It is a gift to criminals.