California officials have begun softening one of the most controversial IT laws in recent years following criticism from the Linux community, open-source developers, and privacy advocates. The new AB 1856 bill proposes exempting most open-source operating systems from the mandatory user age verification requirements envisioned in the Digital Age Assurance Act. If the amendments are adopted, almost all popular distributions such as Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, and Linux Mint will be excluded from the new rules. This is reported by Ixbt.com .
Under the initial AB 1043 law, the responsibility for age verification was to be shifted from websites and apps to the operating system level. The plan required the OS to ask for the user's age during initial device setup and subsequently transmit a special "age signal" to applications. However, unlike iOS or Android, Linux distributions are not owned by centralized commercial companies and often lack a single legal entity.
Digital rights organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sharply criticized the initiative, noting that it would create a dangerous foundation for mass surveillance of users on the internet. The new AB 1856 draft proposes excluding projects based on licenses that allow users to freely copy, modify, and distribute software from the scope of the law.
Nevertheless, commercial ecosystems with their own app stores may still remain under the law's requirements. For example, while Valve's SteamOS is based on Linux, it is tightly integrated with the Steam store. Therefore, regulators may view it as an analog to iOS or Android rather than a classic open-source distribution. The changes are expected to take effect on January 1, 2027.
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