NetChoice, LLC v. Bonta
Issue
NetChoice v. Bonta* asks whether a facial First Amendment challenge can sustain a wholesale injunction against California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act when the statute's coverage definition reaches businesses through both content-based and purely demographic indicators — meaning some covered services may have no expressive dimension at all. The case also asks whether terms like "best interests of children" and "materially detrimental," borrowed from individualized family-law proceedings, are unconstitutionally vague when applied as prospective, industry-wide compliance standards. The answers turn on how courts measure the proportion of unconstitutional applications against all applications under the demanding framework the Supreme Court established in *Moody v. NetChoice* (2024).
What Happened
This is a published, precedential Ninth Circuit opinion resolving California's appeal from a district court order that, on remand from an earlier Ninth Circuit decision, again enjoined the CAADCA in its entirety. The three-judge panel unanimously affirmed in part and vacated in part. It affirmed the injunction of the data-use restrictions and dark-patterns prohibition on vagueness grounds, holding that welfare-standard terms like "best interests of children" are too indeterminate to provide fair notice for class-wide regulatory compliance and that the statute's scienter element does not cure that defect. The court vacated the whole-statute injunction, however, finding that NetChoice had failed to catalog the Act's full range of applications — by focusing exclusively on content-publishing platforms, it ignored non-content coverage indicators that could reach ride-sharing or financial services, effectively converting a facial challenge into an as-applied one. The panel also vacated and remanded the injunctions concerning the age-estimation requirement and the severability of the valid remainder, finding both questions unresolved on the existing record.
Why It Matters
This ruling significantly raises the evidentiary bar for industry coalitions seeking to block child online-safety laws through facial First Amendment challenges: plaintiffs must now map a statute's *entire* universe of applications — including non-expressive ones — before a court can find unconstitutional applications substantial enough to justify a wholesale injunction. The vagueness holding breaks new ground by applying *FCC v. Fox*'s void-for-vagueness standard to child-welfare design mandates, establishing that family-law welfare terms cannot be transplanted into prospective regulatory compliance obligations without adequate definitional grounding. Significant questions remain open on remand, including whether the age-estimation requirement implicates First Amendment-protected speech and whether the CAADCA's valid provisions are severable — determinations that will shape California's enforcement posture and may influence how courts in other circuits assess analogous age-gating laws.
Related Filings
Other proceedings in the same litigation tracked by this monitor.
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