30. Federal Trade Commission · Minor
Give the FTC an educational role empowering parents online instead of regulating
Printed page 876 30. Federal Trade Commission
“Limited-government conservatives would prefer the FTC play an educational role instead. That might include best practices or educational programs to empower parents online.”
What has happened
- Partially done
The Commission did publish new parent-facing material in the window — an infographic guide, Keeping Your Kid Safer Online, on 2025-12-29, and a rewritten guide to parental controls on 2025-04-22 — and its age-verification policy statement is framed as "empowering parents to protect their children online". What it did not do is play that role *instead* of regulating: the same period brought a final COPPA rule, an enforcement policy statement, compulsory 6(b) orders to seven platforms and a run of children's cases. The educational limb is delivered; the substitution the Quote asks for is not.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
- The date comes from the consumer.ftc.gov article listing
(
consumer.ftc.gov/articles?search=parents&items_per_page=50, read 2026-09-01), which prints a date beside each of the 12 parent-facing articles; the article page itself carries no date of its own, only the dates of unrelated consumer alerts in its sidebar. Same shape as the HUD newsroom noted insource-apis.md. - The alternative reading is not started: the operative word in the Quote is “instead”, and the FTC plainly did not swap enforcement for education. Recorded in the spot-check register. partial was chosen because the extracted object is “best practices and educational programs for parents”, and new ones were published inside the window.
- An ftc.gov press-release search for
consumer educationandparentsturns up no new program announcement; the material sits on consumer.ftc.gov and is not announced by release.
- Action
- create
- Object
- FTC best practices and educational programs for parents
- ID
- 2245