To the Honorable Representative
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
April 21, 2026
RE: Opposition to federal age-verification mandates (including H.R. 8250, Parents Decide Act; H.R. 7757, KIDS Act; S. 1748, Kids Online Safety Act; S. 836, Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act; and related proposals)
Dear Representatives,
I am writing as a constituent and as Chief Technology Officer, HOMESERVER LLC (DBA Home Servers), Undisclosed, Iowa. We sell a turnkey home server: a customer-owned appliance preloaded with an entirely open source Debian-based platform offering a single pane for web administration, and the four elements of self hosting. Those being local DNS and DHCP, firewall tooling, and a reverse proxy. All commonly available and publically maintained softwares. We also provide and offer a wide catalog of optional self-hosted services so households can run their own infrastructure on hardware they own. This thusly gives them radical responsibility in what they’re doing as adults regulating their own networks at home. With the policy proposed all such decisions then become owned and operated entirely by and through whatever vendor stack Congress effectively blesses.
My customers are adults who deliberately choose what they run on networks they control. They pay for capability, control, and continuity, not for a national identity layer administered through vendors they never selected and cannot replace at will.
The age-verification approach embedded in the bills cited above (and in related amendments) does not merely add a checkbox for “safety.” It restructures commerce and trust. It pushes lawful businesses and lawful adults into mandated reliance on third-party verification regimes and intermediaries that customers did not contract with, did not audit, and in many cases would not tolerate if the choice were explicit. That is not “parental consent” in a narrow sense; it is a forced trust migration from the customer’s chosen relationship with my business onto a parallel chain of vendors, policies, and failure modes my customers never asked to inherit.
Full stop: if this architecture is locked in as policy, you do not impose a one-time compliance burden—you hold the American people hostage, in practice in perpetuity, to whoever is contracted, commercially dominant, or legally positioned to satisfy the mandate. Lawful activity of real consequence routes through them; they become the de facto third-party authenticator for vast tracts of ordinary life online. That is not a diversified market outcome; it is structural capture. If those entities fail—technically, operationally, or in governance—the loss is not confined to a vendor’s quarterly results; it propagates. Everyone downstream is crippled because everything that mattered already went through them.
In one sentence, as an engineer: what I build is local-first resilience—household infrastructure meant to ride out civilizational-scale discontinuity (our field shorthands that posture as “asteroid-grade”); what this policy would nationalize is a thin trust hub that can stumble on its own traffic—and cripple lawful America in one fault.
To be blunt: whoever votes this into permanence—including anyone who tells themselves this stays confined to ‘protecting kids’—should see what it does to their own family’s digital estate. If lawful use of the network must clear a federally blessed trust chain, no American retains title to their own digital life in any honest sense—they retain a license revocable by policy and priced by intermediaries they never chose. Ownership migrates to that third-party trust; the public becomes a tenant of its own tools. That arrangement does not end with the generation that passes the bill. It inherits: children and grandchildren do not receive an independent stack they can own outright—they receive a perpetual toll owed to whatever verification oligopoly statute entrenched. A vote for permanence here is not “buying safety”; it is conscripting descendants to pay coin, year after year, to a class of gatekeepers Congress helped crown. That is perpetual dependence—economic and civic—of Americans on Americans’ own law, laundered through private intermediaries. Here, that is unacceptable.
America is premised on self-ownership, voluntary contract, and ordered liberty—not on a permanent tithe to a state-anointed trust layer. Other societies may choose fully intermediated digital lives for their publics; that is their domestic affair, not a template we must import, and it does not require us to surrender title at home. Americans who still believe in self-ownership in the classical American sense—the plain idea that a free person holds title to the relationship between their roof, their wire, and their word—will use every lawful means available (engineering, markets, politics, and the courts) to prevent this country from normalizing perpetual third-party ownership of ordinary life online. Not here. Trade and diplomacy have their own hard problems; this letter is about one thing: domestic statute must not strip Americans of meaningful digital title.
What I build and advocate for—local-first, customer-owned, decentralized patterns aligned with a genuinely decentralized web (sometimes called “Web4” in industry shorthand)—runs exactly antithetical to that design. Your proposal assumes mandatory intermediation and a single class of approved trust; mine assumes voluntary relationships, portability, and no irreplaceable national gate. They are not two tweaks of the same stack; they are opposed civil engineering for the internet.
I am not arguing against parents, minors, or good-faith attempts to reduce harm. I am arguing against a predictable market outcome: concentrated gatekeepers, reduced competition, and higher friction for lawful products that already sell on voluntary, willing buyer terms. If Congress wants adults to act like adults, policy should preserve direct voluntary commerce and clear accountability, not displace it with a compliance stack that effectively picks winners by who can afford the gate.
On the technical side, the ecosystem I work in is overwhelmingly open source at the foundation. Much of the paid “assurance” market rides the same public ideas, interfaces, and reference implementations the commons produced. Separately, modern tooling has increased the rate at which software is generated and forked. That does not erase security work, but it does change what “control the code” can mean as a legislative assumption. Mandates that assume scarcity and central choke points tend to fail open in the real world, while still damaging lawful domestic operators who try to comply in good faith.
For these reasons, I ask you to oppose these measures, or at minimum amend them so that:
- Lawful businesses serving adults by default are not required to route customer trust through non-consensual third-party identity or age vendors.
- Any verification obligation is narrowly tailored, minimizes data, avoids national identity dossiers, and includes a small-business hardship path that does not make compliance a cartel game.
- Congress funds real study of market structure harms (concentration, vendor lock-in, privacy externalities) before locking architecture into statute.
Thank you for your service and for considering the perspective of a domestic operator who is trying to sell honest tools to willing customers without being conscripted into someone else’s trust model.
Respectfully,
Anonymous
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