NetChoice is asking every judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to undo a decision that lets Ohio demand your identity before you open an account online.
The group filed its petition for rehearing on July 16, weeks after a divided three-judge panel revived HB33 and became the first federal appeals court in the country to uphold this kind of law.
HB33, Ohio’s Social Media Parental Notification Act, bars anyone under 16 from making an account on a long list of websites unless a parent signs off first. Getting that consent means handing over sensitive documents to confirm a user’s age and identity.
The requirement reaches well past the platforms lawmakers name, catching blogs and book-recommendation sites in the same net.
Those verification checks build new stores of personal data. Sites that never needed your government ID would have to collect it and hold on to it, turning ordinary services into targets for anyone hunting for identities to steal. Ohio calls this child safety. What it manufactures is a fresh cache of records waiting to be breached.
The panel split 2-1 on June 18. Judge Eric Clay’s lead opinion leaned on standing, deciding NetChoice could not sue for the free-speech rights of the minors it says the law shuts out.
He questioned whether the trade group had children’s interests at heart at all, and called the consent rule “a marginal burden that precisely targets the multi-faceted problem that Ohio has identified: Children’s unsupervised assent to terms and conditions for use of platforms that take advantage of and harm them.”
Judge Alice Batchelder agreed the group could not stand in for young users. NetChoice’s interests, she wrote, “vis-a-vis those of minors are not ‘completely consistent,’ ‘closely aligned,’ or even neutral. They are opposed to one another.”
Judge Kevin Ritz read the case differently. He warned the consent mandate could work as an “insurmountable barrier to entry for online speech,” and doubted it would deliver what Ohio promised. Parents give consent one time, he noted, after which a child keeps using a site with no further oversight, which left him unconvinced the law would head off the “issues with sleep, anxiety, body dysmorphia, depression, and bullying” the state blamed on these platforms.
NetChoice wants the full court to reverse. “The First Amendment’s protections apply to digital speech just as they apply to books, movies, and television. Ohio’s law is unconstitutional, and we are confident the full Sixth Circuit will strike it down,” said Paul Taske, director of the NetChoice Litigation Center.
Taske cast the case as a fight over who decides what families can read. “Parenting decisions must be made by parents. The government cannot impose its view of what some parents want on all families across the state,” he said. The debate over parental rights is on top of a data-collection regime that asks adults and children alike to surrender private records for the chance to speak online.
The law has lost in court before, like when Judge Algenon Marbley of the Southern District of Ohio blocked it with a temporary restraining order in January 2024, added a preliminary injunction weeks later, then struck it down for good in April 2025, finding it was not tailored narrowly enough to serve the state’s interest in protecting kids. Ohio appealed, and the June ruling erased that win.
Laws like it have collapsed elsewhere and federal judges have blocked comparable identity-check mandates in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Georgia, each time on First Amendment grounds. The Sixth Circuit’s decision breaks from that run of losses and hands other states a template for pushing the same demands.
Ohio’s new attorney general, Andy Wilson, called the panel ruling “a win for Ohio families.” Whether the full Sixth Circuit agrees, the machinery the law would build stays the same. Age verification does not verify only age. It records who you are, where you are, and what you came to say.
