Welcome to a breakpoint a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of

unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

This summer, the U.S. Senate passed a pair of bills, the Kids Online Safety Act, or Cosa, and the Children's and Teens Online Privacy Protection

Act, or Kappa 2.0.

Each one garnered major bipartisan support, passed by an overwhelming margin of 91 to 3.

If the bills are passed by the House,

they'll be the first major legislation aimed

at protecting kids online in over two decades.

The laws passed that were originally intended to govern the internet

were passed about 20 years ago.

These laws were mostly aimed at things like email exchanges

and could never have anticipated the kind of scope and scale of technology

we have today.

Not only is the internet used for everything from delivering groceries to running a business,

it's the epicenter of our worst addictions, from social media to pornography with algorithms

that are incredibly effective at keeping people online.

And heavy screen time has proven especially harmful for young people.

With effects is varied as shortened detention span, sleep problems, body image issues,

depression, bullying, gambling, addictions, and other addictions, not to mention weird ticks. Parents are left to themselves to protect their

children online with somewhere between little help and outright animosity from the tech companies.

CEO of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, Don Hawkins has noted, and I quote,

...