The Federal Trade Commission recently hosted a workshop called “Attention Economy: How Big Tech Firms Exploit Children and Hurt Families.” The June 4 event’s focus marked an FTC shift away from monopoly concerns about tech companies during former President Joe Biden’s administration and, under FTC leadership during President Donald Trump’s second, nonconsecutive term, toward more cultural and safety concerns for children.

The workshop was reworked from the one planned in the final days of the Biden administration, reportedly then titled, “The Attention Economy: Monopolizing Kids’ Time Online.” The retooled Trump FTC event featured lawmakers, regulators, and child-safety advocates on the political right who recommended more robust FTC enforcement of laws already on the books and for Congress to pass new laws regulating the online spaces around children.

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FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson opened the day by taking aim at the repercussions of minors’ data being monetized. He argued the government should do more to protect a child’s “good name.” Ferguson told the audience that technological progress should serve “the flourishing of ordinary families,” balanced with the twin goal of U.S. artificial intelligence global supremacy.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) was a featured speaker at the event.

“Big Tech is abusing a generation of children,” she declared in her remarks. Blackburn linked the increase in teenage mental health problems to online platforms exposing young users to “bullying, drugs, sexually exploitative material, eating disorders, human trafficking,” and more.

Blackburn raised concerns about artificial intelligence chatbots interacting in harmful ways with children online. Blackburn also took the opportunity to call for the passage of the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill she recently reintroduced after it passed in the Senate but died in the House of Representatives in the last congressional session. The KOSA would create a “duty of care” liability for online platforms when users are under age 17.

Panels throughout the day hosted advocates of beefing up enforcement of the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by the FTC and the passage of federal age verification regulations, along with the enactment of a European Union-style “right to be forgotten” data law for minors, among other legislative efforts to more heavily regulate online spaces.

Noticeably absent from the event were representatives of the so-called “Big Tech” companies and those from companies offering stand-alone online parental control tools. Also missing from the conversation were free speech experts. Many of the federal regulations endorsed at the conference have been passed at the state level, only to be halted on First Amendment concerns in the courts.

While no dissenting voices were hosted as panelists or speakers, those with different perspectives did take to the internet to share their perspective on online child safety policy.

David Inserra, a Cato Institute fellow for free expression and technology, was uninvited from the event after FTC leadership transferred from the Biden to the Trump administration. He posted the remarks he had prepared for the event and added that the revised agenda was a “missed opportunity for experts, users, regulators, and policymakers to engage in a real conversation on this issue of how technological products are used by kids.”

Inserra’s remarks highlighted past policy panics about children and new technologies, online content problems versus the design of online technologies. He said parents are best positioned to protect children in the virtual world.

Other opponents of the policy measures lauded at the workshop have pointed out that age verification laws present serious privacy concerns for children and their parents or legal guardians. Laws requiring age verification have been successfully challenged by industry group NetChoice in Arkansas, California, Florida, Mississippi, Ohio, and Utah, over concerns that the requirement likely violates the First Amendment by overly burdening and chilling broader free speech. It’s unclear what implications the Supreme Court’s recent decision to uphold age verification for adults’ access to online pornography will have on children’s online age verification laws, if any.

“Most of the proposals put forth in the recent workshop will fail to mitigate child exploitation online in any meaningful way,” Maureen Flatley, an executive board member of the anti-child exploitation group Stop Child Predators, told the Washington Examiner.

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“First, none of these recommendations takes one predator off the digital street,” she continued. “Second, they vilify and punish the most reliable source, in fact, the only meaningful source, of information for law enforcement: the tech companies themselves. Cyber tips are the backbone of any law enforcement efforts to attack child exploitation online.”

She concluded, “Until we confront the reality that this is a law enforcement problem and that criminals, not corporate executives, are primarily responsible for abuse playing out in cyberspace, the problem will only get worse.”

Jessica Melugin is the director of the Center for Technology and Innovation at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a 2025 Innovators Network Foundation antitrust and competition policy fellow.