Building the infrastructure for a safer internet

My wife Susannah and I have five children. Like every parent we know, we've spent countless hours configuring parental controls — one app at a time, one device at a time, one child at a time. Netflix has one system. YouTube has another. TikTok, Roblox, Instagram, Discord — each with its own settings screen, its own mental model, its own gaps. A family like ours is managing 30+ separate configurations. Most parents give up after two or three.

That's not a parenting failure. It's a systems failure.

Just as open banking required banks to let consumers manage their financial data from one place, child safety requires platforms to support interoperable parental controls.

The open banking movement proved a powerful principle: consumers shouldn't be locked into each institution's proprietary interface to manage their own data. Banks were required to expose open APIs. Consumers got control. Innovation flourished. The same principle applies to how parents protect their children online.

Phosra is the infrastructure that makes this possible. We're not another parental control app — we're the layer underneath. Parents set rules once. Parental control apps plug in to extend their reach. Platforms connect to offer compliant, interoperable controls. Our open spec covers 320+ platforms in the kids' ecosystem — any platform that adopts it gets instant interoperability.

The timing is not accidental. We're building at an inflection point. KOSA passed the U.S. Senate 91-3. Twenty-two states have introduced or passed child safety legislation. The EU Digital Services Act, the UK Online Safety Act, and Australia's Online Safety Act are creating compliance obligations that platforms cannot ignore. The U.S. Surgeon General has called social media a “profound risk of harm” to children and proposed warning labels. The momentum is bipartisan, global, and accelerating.

Today, Phosra tracks 78 of these child safety laws across 25+ jurisdictions and maps each one to specific enforcement actions. Our rule engine maps to 31 community standards — from screen-free classrooms to delayed smartphone access — representing a growing movement of families and schools. We've published PCSS v1.0, the open specification for how parental controls should work across platforms. The technical spec exists. The infrastructure is live.

What we're building next is simple: we're making Phosra the default way parental controls work. Not by replacing the apps parents use, but by connecting all of them. Not by lobbying for specific laws, but by making every law enforceable. Not by building another walled garden, but by building the open spec that makes walled gardens unnecessary.

The infrastructure for a safer internet should be open, universal, and built to last. That's what we're building.