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
This is good.
It gives smaller porn sites a chance to compete with the big dogs because regulators can’t go after all of them.
Amusingly, as part of similar laws in the UK the regulator decided to make a public shame list of non-compliant websites.
Essentially if you don’t want to follow the government’s writ that you must send your ID to a shady offshore ID firm, they’ve kindly provided a list of websites that won’t ask for it!
With this on top of trying to claim extraterritorial powers against 4chan in the US (fucking lol), I’m starting to think a key check on tyranny in the UK is the incompetence of its public institutions.