[varenc]

Fair point! That does seem like a key difference. But I still wouldn't be surprised if all tech industry legal/compliance teams have been spooked by this. Also under COPPA no one under 13 can make an online account for anything, regardless of what it is. So it's definitely still illegal for Dropbox/Twitter/HN to have 12 year olds with accounts (without parent consent).

They might just want to be able to demonstrate to the FTC that they're confident there's no children with accounts, instead of just telling the FTC "it's well known children don't really use cloud storage services anyway so we never bothered to ask for age".