Netchoice, LLC v. Bonta
Issue
Whether California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (CAADCA), Cal. Civ. Code §§ 1798.99.28–1798.99.40, facially violates the First Amendment through its coverage definition, age estimation requirement, data use restrictions, and dark patterns prohibition, as evaluated under the *Moody v. NetChoice* standard for facial challenges.
What Happened
On remand from a prior Ninth Circuit decision (*NetChoice I*) that had vacated most of the initial preliminary injunction for failure to apply the correct facial-challenge standard under *Moody v. NetChoice*, 603 U.S. 707 (2024), the district court again enjoined the CAADCA in its entirety, concluding that the statute's coverage definition was content-based and triggered strict scrutiny throughout. The Ninth Circuit, reviewing for abuse of discretion, vacated the injunction as to the coverage definition and age estimation requirement because NetChoice failed to develop a sufficient record to satisfy *Moody*'s two-step facial-challenge framework—specifically, NetChoice did not adequately catalog the full scope of the law's applications to allow the court to assess what share of those applications were unconstitutional. The panel affirmed the injunction of the data use restrictions and dark patterns prohibition solely on void-for-vagueness grounds, finding those provisions fail to delineate proscribed conduct with sufficient clarity, and vacated the severability ruling as to the statute's remaining provisions because the record did not support a likelihood that valid provisions were inseverable from the enjoined notice-and-cure provision.
Why It Matters
The decision reinforces that First Amendment facial challengers—including sophisticated litigants like NetChoice—bear a demanding burden under *Moody* to build a record mapping a law's full set of applications before courts can measure unconstitutional uses against the statute's legitimate sweep, effectively raising the evidentiary threshold for pre-enforcement facial injunctions against online child-safety laws. The ruling also signals that states retain meaningful room to enact children's digital privacy legislation, at least where challengers cannot demonstrate facial invalidity across a substantial majority of the law's applications.
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