WASHINGTON >> Ahead of a recent vote in Congress on a child safety bill, a powerful tech lobby representing Google, Meta and other major tech firms sent a forceful warning to lawmakers.

The Kids Online Safety Act was “bad on policy and bad on the law,” the lobby, NetChoice, said in a statement, adding, “Courts across the country repeatedly halted these types of provisions.”

The child safety bill, which would require social media platforms and other sites to limit features that can promote cyberbullying, harassment and the glorification of self-harm, has been a rare piece of legislation with bipartisan support.

But it has largely stalled in Congress lately, thanks in part to NetChoice’s efforts.

The group, which has grown significantly in power and influence over the past decade, is the driving force behind lawsuits that have derailed several state laws regulating the tech industry, including six on child safety. Last week, it filed a seventh lawsuit against a similar child safety law in Tennessee. To win on issues including privacy, child safety, e-commerce and taxes, the lobbying group has relied on a novel legal application of the First Amendment.

NetChoice has effectively argued that the state laws amount in various ways to censorship. Though the statutes are intended to protect children, fight disinformation and bolster privacy, they restrict access to content and could undermine the free expression of individuals and social media companies, the group has claimed.

In these arguments, Big Tech is testing the bounds of the First Amendment, expanding interpretations of the amendment’s definition of freedom of religion, press and speech to provide protections in the internet era. The lobbyists say that Meta, Google, Snap and other social media companies are the modern-day soapboxes of the nation and that the content they host and transmit is protected speech.

The strategy is succeeding. The tech industry has won suits to fend off most meaningful regulation at a state level. When the Supreme Court heard NetChoice’s arguments this year on social media laws in Florida and Texas, it remanded the decision to lower courts but acknowledged protections for internet platforms.

But some public interest groups and academics say the fights led by trillion-dollar corporations like Google and Meta are distorting the original purpose of the First Amendment.

NetChoice is “eviscerating what it means to be human and what is speech, and this gives these — the wealthiest companies in the world — an enormous advantage,” said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia University and a former Biden administration official who worked on White House competition policy. “The First Amendment was intended to protect the underdog, not these companies.”

NetChoice’s leaders argue that their fight is essential for protecting speech online. They say every new wave of technology, from the printing press to the television, has stirred similar debates.

“We believe that the First Amendment should apply fully in the digital age,” Chris Marchese, director of NetChoice, said in an interview. “Government overreach online is just as unconstitutional as government overreach offline, and so there is nothing in our cases and our arguments and our decisions that hasn’t already been upheld by courts.”

NetChoice got its start in 2001 as a tiny lobbying firm focused on fighting e-commerce regulations. Orbitz, eBay and 1-800-Contacts were its earliest members. In 2004, it filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court fighting a Michigan law that would ban the cross-state sale of wine online; in 2009, it successfully sued Maine to block its law that required people to confirm their age before getting access to certain online services. For years NetChoice remained in the shadow of bigger tech lobbyists, spending just $12,000 in 2010.

In 2012, as lawmakers grew increasingly critical of social media and the spread of harmful content, Google and Meta, then known as Facebook, joined NetChoice. The organization grew as more regulation took place at the state level, where legislatures have enacted a flurry of social media laws in recent years in the absence of federal action. NetChoice also counts allies among civil liberties groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and newspaper publishers.

NetChoice relies heavily in its lawsuits on precedent set in a 1997 Supreme Court decision, Reno v. ACLU, which overturned the previous year’s federal Communications Decency Act for violating the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. It has referred to a 50-year-old Supreme Court decision, Miami Herald v. Tornillo, to overturn a Florida law that required newspapers to offer equal space to political candidates who wished to respond to election-related editorials or endorsements.

It has also leaned on a Supreme Court decision from 2011, Sorrell v. IMS Health, which overturned a Vermont law banning the sale, disclosure and use of electronic patient pharmaceutical records. “The creation and dissemination of information are speech” and protected under the First Amendment, the court said.

Some legal experts say the tech industry has exploited that interpretation. “It was a throwaway line by the Supreme Court that has provided the edifice for most of the First Amendment challenges in the digital age,” said Alex Abdo, litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

In 2021, NetChoice sued Florida to overturn a law that barred social media firms from banning political candidates or moderating content based on a political point of view. Soon after, NetChoice sued Texas, Ohio, Arkansas, California and Utah over legislation that related to moderation of political speech and child safety and age-verification laws. The lawsuits established the organization as a major legal center serving as a clearinghouse for the tech industry’s battles in courts.

NetChoice opened a litigation center last year with funds from more than 30 members, including Amazon, eBay, Snap and AOL. It has hired top litigators like Paul Clement, the former solicitor general. Currently, it is fighting 10 lawsuits, and its nine-member lobbying staff regularly testifies in state legislatures and in Congress.

NetChoice didn’t want to be become the tech industry’s de facto law firm, Marchese said. But “there is a need for a consistent voice in the courts advocating for principled outcomes.”

When the group’s arguments reached the Supreme Court this year after NetChoice sued Texas and Florida for laws aimed at banning political content and the accounts of political figures, the justices ultimately declined to rule. But they hinted they agreed with the idea that algorithmic decisions by computer code are equivalent to human speech.

The principle doesn’t change just because it’s “gone from the physical to the virtual world,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in an opinion signed by five justices.

In August, in another victory for the group, a federal appeals court agreed to stop parts of the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, a law passed in 2022 that requires tech companies to design websites with guardrails to prevent young users from seeing harmful material. NetChoice argued that California’s requirements restricted speech.

(The New York Times and the nonprofit Student Law Center filed an amicus brief supporting NetChoice’s lawsuit against the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act.)

Last month, NetChoice sealed its latest victory in a speech case by halting a Utah law that would require users to verify their ages to bolster privacy and keep children safe online. It argued that the law imposed content-based restrictions on social media companies.

“NetChoice’s argument is persuasive. As a preliminary matter, there is no dispute the act implicates social media companies’ First Amendment rights,” Judge Robert Shelby of U.S. District Court said. He referred to NetChoice’s wins in Mississippi, Ohio and Arkansas to back his decision to block the state’s child safety law.

“Defendants have not shown the State’s desire to protect minors eclipses the First Amendment,” Shelby wrote.

Some constitutional scholars say it’s too soon to say if NetChoice will ultimately prevail in redefining speech for internet sites. The decision by the Supreme Court in July to send the two social media cases back to lower courts shows the justices’ view that the issue deserves more debate, said Genevieve Lakier, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

“The law is far from settled, and I think the process is working as it should,” Lakier said.