Major technology companies have sued the state of Texas over its age-verification law, putting a stake in the ground as more state legislatures look to limit minors’ access to certain apps and online services.

“The Texas App Store Accountability Act imposes a broad censorship regime on the entire universe of mobile apps,” the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) said in a court filing last week. “In a misguided attempt to protect minors, Texas has decided to require proof of age before anyone with a smartphone or tablet can download an app. Anyone under 18 must obtain parental consent for every app and in-app purchase they try to download—from ebooks to email to entertainment.”

In 2025 alone, at least 10 states have enacted or introduced measures requiring various app or service providers to perform age-checks on users before granting access. But the Texas statute, set to take effect January 1, is considered among the most sweeping, covering a wide range of industries.

The law “imposes a sweeping age-verification, parental consent, and compelled speech regime on both app stores and app developers in violation of the First Amendment,” CCIA said in a press release accompanying its filing. “The law would also regulate app developers by requiring them to “age-rate” their content into several subcategories and explain their decision in detail. Developers must also notify app stores in writing every time they improve or modify the functions, features, or user experience of their apps.”

In addition to the CCIA filing, the Texas App Store Accountability Act is also the target of a separate lawsuit by a student advocacy group and two Texas minors.

Read more: Chinese Consumers File Antitrust Complaint Against Apple Over App Store Practices

“We support online protections for younger internet users, and those protections should not come at the expense of free expression and personal privacy,” CCIA senior VP and chief of staff Stephanie Joyce said in a statement. “This Texas law violates the First Amendment by restricting app stores from offering lawful content, preventing users from seeing that content, and compelling app developers to speak of their offerings in a way pleasing to the state. That is why we are asking the court to strike down this law and to block it from being enforced while we demonstrate how severely it violates the U.S. Constitution.”

The student group’s lawsuit raises many of the same concerns. “The First Amendment does not permit the government to require teenagers to get their parents’ permission before accessing information, except in discrete categories like obscenity,” Ambika Kumar, an attorney with Davis Wright Tremain who is representing the students said in a statement announcing the litigation. “The Constitution also forbids restricting adults’ access to speech in the name of protecting children. This law imposes a system of prior restraint on protected expression that is presumptively unconstitutional.”

Per Ars Technica, both lawsuits argue the Texas statute is preempted by the Supreme Court’s 2011 decision in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, which struck down a California law restricting the sale of violent video games to children. The Supreme Court said in Brown that a state’s power to protect children from harm “does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.”