NetChoice is a United States technology trade association, founded in 2001, whose stated mission is to "make the Internet safe for free enterprise and free expression" (Source: netchoice.org). It is best known for a sustained litigation programme challenging state internet statutes on First Amendment grounds, and it has extended that programme to state AI legislation, including companion-chatbot and age-assurance mandates. Its members include major technology platforms; in Moody v. NetChoice the Supreme Court described NetChoice and CCIA together as "trade associations whose members include Facebook and YouTube" (Source: supreme.justia.com).
Overview
NetChoice states three organizing principles: choice ("consumers know best the products and services they need"), limited government ("the internet has thrived under light-touch regulation"), and competition. It began work in Washington, D.C. in 2001 with a coalition of online businesses facing barriers to e-commerce, reached twenty members in 2007 and thirty in 2019, and has since organized its work into issue areas including antitrust, artificial intelligence, data centers, digital parenting, free speech online, internet governance, internet taxation, online privacy, the peer-to-peer economy, and transportation innovation (Source: netchoice.org).
The association's early activity centred on e-commerce and taxation: it helped the Federal Trade Commission organize a task force on barriers to e-commerce in 2002, joined a Supreme Court amicus brief in 2004 concerning Michigan's prohibition on interstate wine shipments, led a thirty-state campaign in 2014 on access to online accounts of deceased users, and in 2016 filed suits over internet sales-tax laws in South Dakota, Massachusetts, Wyoming, Indiana, Ohio and Tennessee. It also assisted in drafting National Telecommunications and Information Administration privacy guidelines for facial recognition technology in 2016, and from 2019 has advocated for state tax treatment favourable to large data centers (Source: netchoice.org).
Steve DelBianco is president and chief executive. Other listed staff include Robert Winterton (vice president of public affairs), Amy Bos (vice president of government affairs), Bartlett Cleland (general counsel and director of strategic initiatives), Paul Taske (director of the NetChoice Litigation Center), Zach Lilly (director of government affairs), Patrick Hedger (director of policy) and Corbin Barthold (senior litigation fellow). Chris Cox, a co-author of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, serves on the board of directors and has appeared as outside counsel, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on Section 230 in 2017 (Source: netchoice.org).
Litigation programme
NetChoice runs a dedicated Litigation Center. Its published docket spans challenges to state statutes in Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia, plus a suit against the City of Chicago, alongside a body of amicus filings (Source: netchoice.org). The programme dates to at least 2009, when the association sued Maine over a law restricting how minors may use online services, winning an injunction before the state repealed the law in 2010 (Source: netchoice.org).
Two lines of that docket bear directly on AI and algorithmic governance. The content-moderation cases against Florida's SB 7072 and Texas's HB 20, brought with CCIA, produced Moody v. NetChoice (2024), in which the Supreme Court vacated and remanded. Justice Kagan delivered the opinion of the Court, joined in full by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Sotomayor, Kavanaugh and Barrett, and in part by Justice Jackson; Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch concurred in the judgment only. The opinion signalled that traditional editorial curation is protected expression without resolving the status of algorithmic ranking (Source: supreme.justia.com; see Algorithmic Speech Doctrine). The California Age-Appropriate Design Code litigation, tracked at NetChoice v. Bonta (CAADCA litigation), produced the distinction between settings mandates, which survived, and content-judgment mandates, which were blocked on vagueness grounds.
The association also files amicus briefs. On July 2, 2026 it filed one with CCIA and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Bogard v. Alphabet, supporting Google and TikTok and arguing that the district court had appropriately dismissed the plaintiff's suit under Section 230. It separately obtained a preliminary injunction against Arkansas Act 900 in the Western District of Arkansas (Source: netchoice.org).
Positions on AI regulation
NetChoice maintains artificial intelligence and data centers as standing issue areas and runs campaigns including "Responsible AI Principles to Maintain America's Tech Dominance," "The Transformative Power of AI," "Investing in AI Education," "Data Centers 101" and "Data Centers Help Local Communities" (Source: netchoice.org).
Patrick Hedger, its director of policy, testified against Connecticut SB 5 before the state's Joint Committee on General Law on March 3, 2026, raising three objections: that the bill's restrictions on "AI companions" and its implicit age-gating requirements violate the First Amendment as content-based regulation; that terms including "reasonably foreseeable," "capable of" and "catastrophic risk" are unconstitutionally vague under the Due Process Clause; and that the measure duplicated existing law (Source: netchoice.org). The first objection — that design and disclosure mandates aimed at chatbots are speech regulation rather than conduct regulation — is the same theory the association advanced in the platform-moderation cases, applied one layer down the stack.
On the federal-versus-state question, NetChoice is grouped with CCIA and the Chamber of Progress among industry coalitions aligned with preemption of state AI law on compliance-cost and market-fragmentation grounds (see AI Federalism).
Relationships
- litigates: NetChoice v. Bonta (CAADCA litigation).
- depends-on: AI and the First Amendment, Algorithmic Speech Doctrine.
- contradicts: Content vs Architecture Theory of Social Media Harm (the association's filings press the content theory against architecture-based mandates).
- related: CCIA — Computer & Communications Industry Association, Chamber of Progress, AI Federalism, Three Theories of Consent Failure (Information / Capacity / Design).