Pornhub Blocks All of Utah from Its Site | Hacker News Reader

Pornhub Blocks All of Utah from Its Site

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83 pointsDDSDev39 comments

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So, keeping score, that's 1 website that has chosen to block the entire state versus 0 that have decided to comply with Utah's strict social media regulations. I wonder if other companies might do the same?

Yeah, it'll be much more interesting next year when the social media regulations go into affect.

I suspect this is the preferred solution for the legislature. At no effort of their own the problem has disappeared. And disappeared in such a way that nobody can participate. (Dup)

What problem has disappeared? There are still millions of porn sites accessible by Utahans of any age, no?

(This is a genuine question. I’m not trying to be snippy, or even to disagree, just seeking clarification).

Yes, but I imagine that other porn sites are going to block Utah as well. That being said, nothing's really going to change unless Utah bans VPNs as well.

Websites that already flaunt the law (typically on copyright, but also on adult content distribution) because they're not US-based, will continue to do so. Only US-based operations will go to the trouble of blocking Utah. Which means Utah citizens will likely resort to non-US, less-regulated sites, making everything worse (more extreme content, less protections for people appearing in content, etc etc).

>Only US-based operations will go to the trouble of blocking Utah.

Apparently not, as Pornhub is Canadian.

On paper PornHub seems headquartered in Cyprus, and parent company MindGeek in Luxembourg. Tax reasons both probably. But it doesn't matter because MindGeek also owns Brazzers, Reality Kings, and a bunch of other porn studios, and they operate out of the US ("porn valley") a lot. Simply ignoring US law can get them in to a lot of trouble. Even a EU-based outfit is relatively safe in comparison, never mind something located in Russia or whatnot.

I expect Canada is not beyond the reach of US copyright law, in practice.

Until you can't type "porn" in Google and get it, immediately, for free, Utah has made no progress.

I also suspect that there are more legislators than you'd think becoming very well acquainted with VPNs right now.

>> In 2021, Cox signed a law that would require device manufacturers to add adult content filters on all smartphones and tablets sold in Utah.

I know this isn't in effect, but won't this hurt only Utah? Just don't sell devices there. People will buy them across the border.

California does this all the time, and this actually works for California because, well, they matter. Businesses want access to their market.

Utah has less people than my city, and produces 0.9% of the national GDP. Anyone attempting to do business there at any scale also quickly realizes that it is not a secular state government and you'll have to bribe/work around the Mormon church.

So Utah wins. I think the goal of these laws is to decrease porn usage primarily with any child safety benefit as secondary.

Do they win? Did the porn usage actually decrease? I'm not sure how you'd even measure that given common distribution areas like Reddit or Twitter. Unless someone does real research on this in a few months, I don't think anyone can be said to "win" here.

Short-term I would expect the usage to be registered as higher while people interested in porn are now checking other sites to figure out what's available.

Pornography is prohibited by Islam, and yet Islamic countries are among the largest consumers of pornography in the world. Humans need an outlet for sexual urges, and sexual repression only makes those urges more acute.

This is great news for VPN providers.

How do state laws such as this not contradict federal interstate commerce laws?

Serious answer, because in order for federal law to supersede state law they have to make their own law that "occupies the field" [1] or explicitly says in the law that it preempts state law.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/occupy_the_field

There are many state laws that contradict a federal law. But they have to actually be challenged by a federal court in order to be nullified. States can make up all the hair-brained laws they want but if they never get sued by the feds then nobody cares.

For instance, all the states legalizing marijuana right now in defiance of federal law.

i was curious what the splashy page looked like:

https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/2023/05/01/pornhub-largest-po...

Many cryptocurrency websites refuse services country by country, and in the United States case, I saw service restrictions on state by state level. Many financial services (overseas hedge funds) websites refuse access to US persons.

The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) requires banks and other financial institutions comply with a bunch of regulation for they pleasure of having an American as a customer. Unless it's a particularly interesting market for a foreign bank, they, as you've seen, just won't do business with an Americans.

Makes sense. Utah is 1% of the population of the United States and .04% of the world.

Let's say, for some unexpected idiotic reason, ID age verification becomes widespread for more than just porn. Wouldn't that be the first thing people than start generating via midjourney and similar AIs? Fake ids to pass age checks?

How is an AI-generated profile picture going to circumvent an ID lookup? States aren't considering facial recognition for age verification; they're going to require affirmative proof in the form of a state or federal ID that can be looked up.

(And note: on a policy level, this is fundamentally different from your neighborhood's bar having a conveniently broken ID reader: an online service can't meaningfully claim to lack the connectivity needed for ID lookups.)

> an online service can't meaningfully claim to lack the connectivity needed for ID lookups

Partial connectivity outages happen literally every day. Most people don’t notice. Websites like “down for everyone or just me”, or uptime monitors that monitor from dozens of different source locations, exist because of this.

I don't think this addresses the point: if you can connect to a service, then laws like this will require them to make an ID challenge. If you can't connect, then it's a moot point.

The service itself can't say that it can't connect to you, because it's an online service and you're trivially connected to it.

You can't Midjourney a valid matching name and government ID number

You can't ChatGPT a database entry in a government server, either

Obviously, but either you need to do a gov ID lookup (which, is it even possible/scalable/feasible JSUT for age checks?) or need to keep the ID proofs for an audit. I've only really seen ID checks for financial apps/services where proof of exact identity is required, not of age.

Probably no feasible in the US because of political reasons, but technical I think it could be done similar to how gamling works in Denmark.

You have a government SSO solution (2auth?) called NemID / MitID that is normally used for Banking[1], doctor or hospital appointment, library, student loans and what not.

But if you want to gamble on a Danish online casino you also have to verify your account with it. You can even set yourself on an exclusion list, and will be banned from all Danish online casinos. [2]

What is JSUT?

[1] No matter what bank you are at, same login, pretty neat

[2] https://www.spillemyndigheden.dk/en/rofus#-rofus-

It's already scalable and feasible: ID.me

No but people are probably going to find that an entire school has a picture of their ID because their kid made a quick copy and shared it with their friends to access those sites.

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