Every rule traces to a statute.
Every OCSS rule category resolves to enacted law you can open and read — so conformance is observer-not-vote: evidence you weigh, never an approval we issue.
Statutes pass. Platforms interpret. Children wait.
The lag between a child-safety law being signed and platforms actually enforcing it is measured in years — not because platforms are unwilling, but because every statute uses different language for the same protections. “Verifiable parental consent,” “algorithmic audit,” “age-appropriate design” each get re-implemented from scratch on every surface.
OCSS closes that gap by publishing the shared technical vocabulary, the cross-reference back to the statute that demands each protection, and the open conformance contract platforms can ship against on day one. The point of an open standard is that you don't have to trust any one vendor's reading of the law — the mapping is in the open, and it's testable.
Built to be audited, not asserted.
The load-bearing claim is that every rule traces to a statute. Rather than assert it, here is the trace itself — a single enacted protection followed from the law that demands it, to the category that names it, to the action a platform takes and the receipt you can re-derive. Read top to bottom; nothing here asks for faith.
Conformance is evidence, not approval.
This is the single line a policy office cares about most, so we state it exactly as the spec does — no softening, no implied stamp. OCSS conformance does not confer regulatory approval and is not a COPPA safe harbor. It is something a regulator can weigh, alongside everything else, when evaluating an implementation.
Phosra is building toward OCSS Certified— a status earned from the standard and its conformance suite, never issued by Phosra. We don't self-certify, and we ship no “Phosra Certified” badge. OCSS itself is pre-release: an individual IETF Internet-Draft, Draft 4, not a ratified standard.
“A conformance result is evidence that an implementation satisfies the tested requirements at the time of testing. It is not an approval, a certification by the steward, or a determination of legal compliance, and it confers no safe harbor under any statute.”
Read the full §5.1 at openchildsafety.com
A bill, re-expressed against the taxonomy.
The clearest way to see the crosswalk is to watch a real bill route through it. Below, a state child-safety bill is mapped from its own statutory language to the stable rule categories that platforms already enforce — so the same obligation reads the same way on every surface.
From bespoke statutory prose to citable categories
A worked example showing how a state bill can reference the 115-category taxonomy instead of platform-specific language. Each obligation in the bill resolves to a category id with an existing enforcement meaning — so the text a legislature passes and the action a platform takes are the same object, not two translations that drift apart in implementation.
The compliance hub
A public, filterable index of all 91 tracked laws — citable in policy memos and committee briefings, each linking through to its full provision and rule-category mapping.
Open the hubRule-category ↔ statute mapping
Machine-readable JSON of which categories each statute activates — the literal crosswalk, available at /api/compliance/map. Diff it across registry updates to see exactly what a new law adds.
Per-law detail pages
Every tracked statute resolves to a detail page with its key provisions, status, jurisdiction, and the rule categories it triggers — at /compliance/[slug].
The OCSS specification
The open spec the taxonomy and conformance contract live in — Draft 4, an individual IETF Internet-Draft. Hosted at the standard's home, not here, so it can outlive any single implementer.
Read the spec at openchildsafety.comWe don't own the standard. That's the point.
A standard one vendor controls is a standard a regulator should discount. So OCSS is governed to be un-capturable: verifiable steward succession, a ≥3-router federation, and a conformance suite whose own code rates a Phosra-only world RED. The canonical spec, the rule registry, and the conformance suite live at openchildsafety.com — not here.
That separation is what makes the evidence worth weighing: you're checking it against signed records and open tests, not against Phosra's word.
Read the mapping. Then weigh the evidence.
A 30-minute walkthrough of the registry, the taxonomy, and the conformance contract — tailored to the bill or jurisdiction your office is evaluating. No sales pitch; we show you what's verifiable and what isn't yet.
Verify the standard itself at openchildsafety.com — spec, rule registry, and conformance suite.