Pornhub has disabled its site in Texas to object to a state law that requires the company to verify the age of users to prevent minors from accessing the site.
Texas residents who visit the site are met with a message from the company that criticizes the state’s elected officials who are requiring them to track the age of users.
The company said the newly passed law impinges on “the rights of adults to access protected speech” and fails to pass strict scrutiny by “employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors.”
I think asking for ID online to view porn is practically unenforceable, which is why I’m of the opinion that a site like Pornhub will quickly be replaced by far more disreputable sites who will not follow the rules requiring IDs to view the porn.
Pornhub cutting off Texas just isn’t as big of a win as people are making it out to be, imho, simply because its unenforceable and the kind of sites that are willing to ignore it probably have far worse on their sites to begin with. So those kind of sites will see their traffic drastically increase and men consuming porn in Texas will be exposed to far more violent and dangerous content. Pornhub is doing the right thing, sure, but it doesn’t mean it’s that simple.
Do people really think Texas is going to spend time playing whack-a-mole with every single random porn site on the internet? I don’t.
Won’t Texas just go to the next step and start forcing the ISPs to ban the sites starting a never ending game of whackamole until they just outright ban all porn at the ISP level with a way to add a site super easily and on demand.
At that point it’s VPN only in which case you can access it all anyway
Edit: and of course the blanket isp ban will hit non porn things to, but that’s the cost to save the children!
Court time costs money, and in each one of these cases, they’ll have to start legal proceedings against every site, and then, if that doesn’t work and then they’ll have to sue each and every ISP for compliance. Taking it to court is a surefire way for the law to be shot down by the courts. Blocking at that level would undoubtedly run into Freedom of Speech issues.
There are roughly 4 million adult sites on the internet. That’s a lot of fucking court cases, especially when a bunch of these aren’t even headquartered in the US.
In Texas alone there are over 150 Internet Service Providers. While that’s an easier number to target, it’s far more likely to run into the 1st Amendment argument that blocking the site is blocking the freedom of speech of the ISP.
The reason they went with age verification was because it doesn’t end up in 1st Amendment territory. Outright blocking the sites for non-compliance and taking them to court risks the court throwing out the law and saying its unconstitutional.
Texas can’t even keep its power grid on, I have serious doubts they have the ability to achieve either of these things. Asking ISPs to wholesale block sites is about as difficult to enforce as age verification, which is basically unenforceable as it stands.