As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.
Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and its network of sister sites—some of the largest adult content platforms in the world—pulled service in Missouri, replacing their homepages with a video of performer Cherie DeVille speaking about the privacy risks and chilling effects of age verification.
Archive: http://archive.today/uZB13
I’ve yet to see any state legislature take that proposal seriously. Unlike trying to make porn sites take your credit card info in advance (a policy they hated so much gosh darn it!) you’re really fucking with the money when you try and regulate VPNs. Also, just… not really that practical. For the same reason Congress has been pretty toothless when it comes to regulating Torrents and digital encryption, going after VPNs at the regulatory level is something of a technological rabbit hole.
Nothing will ever make anyone on the internet learn a language other than English.
snekerpimp meant if every state requires ID, then VPN to another state will not get around the ID check.
Setting aside the fact that there’s no appetite for these laws in liberal states because its purely a conservative fetish, you can still get porn on the internet without going to the big corporate online clearinghouses.
FFS, there was porn on Napster back in the day.
Napster was audio only. Did you mean limewire, or kazaa, or one of the many napster clones that came after?
There’s no appetite for these laws in the voter public of any state, as far as I can tell given how VPN usage skyrockets in every state where these laws are put in place. Is California no longer liberal? Also consider the people running sites in any of the states that have such a law. They may resort to just blanket ID-checking everyone rather than risk prosecution.
Evangelical right-wing states have a huge contingent of politicians who compete with one another to be the toughest on “child sex trafficking” and other Epstein-tangential topics. So, in the GOP primary, you get a lot of promises about how you’re going to round up all the pedos and put them to the sword or whatever. And this inevitably manifests as “please insert your dick into this pepper grinder to access the pornography” laws, as a sort-of practical compromise.
Current Status: Failed (2024-08-15: In committee: Held under submission.)
Looks like they’re retaining their title. That said, if you peak under the “Supporters and Opponents” what you’re going to see in the Supporters section is a litany of right-wing evangelical organizations and a couple of mega-corps.
The current strategy appears to be refusing to host content in the regulated states. Even then, there are plenty of social media and general content distribution channels that dodge the regulation by claiming to be content-blind in how they serve their data. I don’t see Facebook or YouTube getting the business end of any of these regulations. Almost as though they’re toothless if you’ve got enough money to tip your Congresscritters.