How the American war on porn could change the way you use the internet
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But as that won't fly for first amendment reasons, imposing an impractical age verification requirement is the next best thing. The impracticality is intentional, the people advocating for these laws don't want it to be possible to comply with.
If those that lobby for these laws want to track porn users, then a fair exchange might be to require public registration of one's religious affiliation with the state and require it for religious donations to remain untaxed.
They might back down really fast and understand how important privacy is.
Pornhub is earning money from the porn. Huge difference. Pornhub intends to show its content to minors. In the case where someone leaves it inadvertently, it's an accident (like finding Dad's hidden store of playboys).
And yes, in general, leaving porn intentionally where some kids may find it is illegal (and a sex crime!). For example, in California, It's CA penal code 288.2 (https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/penal-code/pen-sect-288-2/).
If the purpose of pornhub is to arouse, then pornhub providing its services to a child is illegal in California and many other states. The only way it's not already illegal is if pornhub is going to claim it's not meant to arouse (I mean come on... really?)
I'm honestly shocked this is even controversial. What's going on here is that the law is actually already being broken in most states, including liberal California; but the state governments are unable to enforce it. The laws in Texas et al make it enforceable and clear, as it should be.
I'm not some prude. I don't think these things should be banned outright, but it seems obvious to me that there's every interest in preventing children from viewing it. First of all children under a certain age should never be exposed to this stuff and if they are, it should frankly be investigated. Secondly, it can be harmful to minors to view porn, as evidenced by many studies on the matter.
It seems to me that a major driver of intuition here is whether a website is a "transaction of service", or simply a thing that you can look at if you go to a certain place. PornHub is large and complex and prints t-shirts, and so perhaps intuitively they feel like a "service". But what if I write a silly little piece of erotica and host it as a plain txt file on my pokey little personal website, behind a link that says "click here for my silly piece of erotica (18+ only pls!)". Should I be legally compelled to collect and store people's personal information over that? Should it really be illegal to put arousing material on a public facing webserver?
Alternatively, Pornhub can partner with physical storefronts and create a system so that your local corner store can verify you for a fee.
Either way, that's on them to figure out.
> Should it really be illegal to put arousing material on a public facing webserver?
If it's in a place easily discoverable by teenagers and you're fighting for the ability to show it to teenagers and children, then yes, it should actually be illegal.
That's the diference between no-name you doing it and pornhub. Pornhub is well-known and anyone can find it. It's discussed in various publications. Any kid can know what it is and go look for it. It's like if you brewed beer for yourself and left it on your property... fine. But if you're Budweiser, you can't just leave your beer in a cooler in a park and then wash your hands of the responsibility of not selling to minors. Yes, we expect more from more sophisticated market participants. That's hardly something to clutch pearls over.
What you are describing is de-anonymization.
> Alternatively, Pornhub can partner with physical storefronts and create a system so that your local corner store can verify you for a fee.
Dito. Plus you now have to announce to your local shop your porn consumption. I have no idea of your local customs, but it's not a subject commonly talked about with the grocery cashier here.
No different than having to buy porn magazines at your local corner store.... And that's the point. If you include having to present yourself to someone, never in history has there ever been a presumption of complete anonymity. That's a made up right. In general, if you're embarrassed to tell someone else what you're doing you probably shouldn't do it.
So… going 25 years back in time and forgo any online shopping ? Or your argumentum ad antiquitatem should only apply to porn ?
> never in history has there ever been a presumption of complete anonymity.
Everything as a first.
> In general, if you're embarrassed to tell someone else what you're doing you probably shouldn't do it.
That's an absolute insane take. Different peoples have different morals values, not wanting to broadcast your personal life as nothing to do with "embarrassment", and a lot of time, more about your safety.
Should people don't abort because they don't want to tell everyone about it ? Do you always tell your coworkers when your going to take shit ? Do you share your sexual life with your plumber ? Even if he's a religious bigot and your gay ?
> That's an absolute insane take. Different peoples have different morals values, not wanting to broadcast your personal life as nothing to do with "embarrassment", and a lot of time, more about your safety.
Absolutely! You have every right to think showing pornography to children is not only morally right, but morally required. However, the laws of the state of California, and most other states, say it's illegal. So regardless of what you think, under the law you are a criminal.
Pornhub has every right to believe what it likes!
That's an insanely privileged perspective. Lots of people need to hide things, because, like it or not, society is full of judgmental dickheads.
Are you trolling? This comment is breathtaking in its naivety.
False, as interaction on the web and in meatspace are not equivalent.
By going to a brick & mortar shop, you already know you have to show your face and have kind of a low expectation of privacy (and its already a problem for some people to go to a sex shop, in part because of the social stigma some religion put on enjoying sex), but you don't have to ID yourself further assuming you look old enough.
Checking age in a brick & mortar shop, for anything from alcool to porn, doesn't force you to log your identity in a database.
On the contrary, you don't have to show your face to access a website, neither have to ID yourself.
By requiring it for porn, even with a convoluted pseudo-privacy-focused way, you're now requiring it for any website that could host porn even if it's not their focus (e.g : reddit, twitter), or pushing said websites to become puritan.
Neither does checking age on the web. The whole 'database' thing is a scare tactic. They have to make sure you're not a minor. That's it.
Again, I'm shocked this is controversial. You can be the most pro-porn person on the planet, but surely you don't think children should be exposed to this stuff, right? In many states, children can't even see inside liquor stores (mandated blackout curtains), yet we think it's okay they're watching porn? Come on. Let's just be normal.
> you're now requiring it for any website that could host porn even if it's not their focus (e.g : reddit, twitter), or pushing said websites to become puritan.
Well... yeah? If you have user generated content, you have to moderate it. Remember during the previous two presidential elections when we demanded every website moderate political speech? And now, it's a porn free for all?
Because surely that is the more valid comparison than physical stores.
United States Postal Service v. Hustler Magazine, Inc. said Hustler had the right to send unrequested copies of the magazine to Congress members. If only they had thought to require people to send a copy of their id first before being allowed to receive porn.
In any case, there's no law saying that if I, as an adult, want to get a subscription to the print edition of Hustler magazine, then Hustler is obligated to verify that I am an adult.
Not now, not in the 1970s.
Why should the internet be any different? It's "literally no different."
Why aren't companies being held liable?
Pornhub should not have more privileges than everyone else.
Look, most states explicitly allow parents showing porn to minors under the guise of education. If you want your kid to view porn... that's your prerogative. But the companies themselves cannot distribute pornography to minors. It is illegal already.
You wrote "It's literally no different than the current laws against selling porn to minors physically."
I pointed out that the laws regarding physical stores are different than the laws regarding mail. There is no law requiring me to present identification or other proof of age before I subscribe to a pornographic magazine.
You can't cherry pick the analogy that works best for you, without explaining why other (IMO more) reasonable analogies are invalid.
You pointed to 47 USC § 223 but didn't read it closely enough to figure out it isn't relevant. It requires "a telecommunications device", but that does not include an interactive computer service.
The definitions say "The use of the term “telecommunications device” in this section ... does not include an interactive computer service" and "The term “interactive computer service” has the meaning provided in section 230(f)(2) of this title." where "The term “interactive computer service” means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server".
Internet companies aren't liable under the law you pointed to for the simple reason that the law doesn't apply to them.
The law explicitly says that anyone who makes an interactive computer service display porn to a minor has broken a law (paragraph (d)). Your 'rebuttal' is based upon only reading (a). Yes, pornhub is not doing anything wrong under (a), but under (d) it clearly is. The owners and producers of pornhub are causing minors to be transmitted porn via an ICS.
Yes, ISPs are not liable because they're just carrying public traffic. But under section (d), even if a minor requests the porn, you cannot serve it to them. Please read it.
(d) refers to "obscene or child pornography".
While some pornography is obscene under US law, in general pornography is "indecent", not obscene.
See Sable Communications of California v. FCC, from when the US tried to regulate dial-a-porn, and the courts decided the original law was overly broad.
Only (b) refers to "indecent communication" (and only in the context of "commercial purposes"), and it specifically requires a telephone.
If I understand the history, that was from the 1989 amendment to the Communications Act of 1934, known as the Helms Amendment, and the courts decided that was sufficiently narrowly tailored to not affect 1st amendment rights (see the court judgement in Dial Information Services v. Thornburgh).
It appears, based on my shallow understanding of the history, that I can set up an automated recording such that if you call it, it plays back a recorded sex chat which is indecent but not obscene. And I can do that without requiring age identification from those who call.
I might have to inform the telephone company that I have done so, so they can let people who opt-out of being able to connect to such numbers from doing so, but otherwise it's my first amendment right.
Which circles us back to yet another analogy which seems more appropriate than your focus on the sale of pornography in physical stores.
If parents turn around and then give that good/service to their child, all bets are off. The store clerk doesn't follow you home, do they? I should hope not.
If they are in control of these things their church has a reason to exist.
Then they can use the guilt from wanting to watch porn into donations to their tax-exempt churches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_sports
I don't think porn is in this category.
I have not seen any real evidence that would justify the concern, and for the most part the indications are the opposite — there is less harm when it's easier to get.
But for the sake of argument, if it can be demonstrated that some content is harmful, then a ban is justifiable.
The republican scheme called "Project 2025" calls for criminalizing porn. Where there's a will, there's a way, and that's why republicans must be kept out of office. They don't care about the first amendment or any of the other amendments except maybe the 2nd amendment when it serves their agenda. They've had banning all porn on their platform for years, they'll eventually do it if we stupidly let them.
So you don't think these are Republicans?
Conservative? Absolutely. And I don't think any conservatives would even argue otherwise. I mean, this is their dream.
That's ...a job.
> Device-based age verification
This seems like something Apple will inevitably get into. It could be enough pressure to deter device-sharing.
edit: and I don't mean they'll be forced to do it. They'll just use it as an opportunity. Eg, pornhub will work in Texas for 'age-verified devices" -- no ID upload required. (At least not to the site in question). Texans won't need to futz with a VPN, they'll just use iPhone. Parents will want to get their kids devices that have the verification.
The major sites that I know also run AI over all uploads to check there aren't other persons in the media (outside those authorized to be in there, with release forms).
On the upload side, these sites seem to run a tight ship these days. These are the legit ones who are now getting cut off in the ban. Not the rogue sites running out of Kazakhstan.
I was wondering if many measures to reduce the trauma are already in place? You could show a small thumbnail, or black out most of the picture, or maybe blur everything except a small part of the image.
Definitely a difficult job, I wish they were better treated.
With the legit porn sites, the main purpose of the checks is to avoid creators uploading anything without verified third parties in it. If they uploaded anything outrageous like CSAM their account would be terminated along with all their revenue, so at least for the Pornhubs of this world their human moderators are probably not seeing very much of the really fucked up shit. BUT, saying that, they are seeing a lot of really, really weird porn. Pornhub still allows shit that is technically legal, but would be off-putting to a lot of moderators being paid 50 cents an hour.
Trust me, I'll never forget it.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Cloudflare spearhead an initiative for a “privacy-preserving age verification protocol.”
Yes, despite them shipping a browser. That's in the can't avoid category.
For example, there are lots of content verification services that work out-of-band from end-to-end encrypted messaging systems.
It would be trivial to direct this towards all kinds of "what are people viewing" investigations for new laws and new vpns.
Social media seems far more pervasive amongst young people than porn.
Social media ain't never going to be banned though.
The powers that be have been pretty careful to not drive all communication onto Signal for example.
Wicked
Where the Crawdads Sing
The Perks of being a Wallflower
Looking for Alaska
1989
That aside, I'm not convinced unfettered access to all varieties of hardcore pornography is a good thing for society, especially kids.
The solution is for parents to be mindful of their children and not allow them to use the internet without supervision.
We shouldn't become a nanny state or a spy state because of bad parenting.
It's not clear that there is a similar effect from seeing boobs.
I hate carrying water for these shitty laws, but I don't think it's possible to stop a sufficiently motivated child from obtaining unfettered access to the Internet. I don't think it's about "bad parenting".
You're missing it. It's not just your own kids. It's your kids going to their friend's house and their friend's older sibling showing them something. And this is a one-way street. They can't unsee things they're too young for.
> We shouldn't become a nanny state or a spy state because of bad parenting.
You should see all the social services infrastructure designed to protect children from bad (or worse) parents.
In Middle Eastern countries every home has a VPN subscription, it is an open secret, and there is no effort to crack down on it or block it (i.e. not like China). It lets the government say "We banned the naughty stuff," while allowing their citizenry to rightly access everything at the same time.
The only people put out by the bans in the Middle East are tourists fresh off the plane who didn't do their research.
I also don't think the law in Texas is written against the consumer, e.g. it doesn't say it's illegal to view porn if you haven't shown an ID. Rather, it's levied against the distributor to say it's illegal to show porn to someone you haven't age verified.
So it's not like the act of using the VPN to circumvent this would be criminal.
The ME is obviously a bit of a different situation as they run ISP-based firewall rules to outright ban unwanted sites.
However, the VPN I had setup at my house worked fine and had no issues with being blocked on the basic VPN setup.
And it would be a big overreach of state powers IMHO.
I think technically a state could legislate against it. States have some laws in the US already which would probably raise eyebrows. Illinois makes it up to 5 years in prison to violate the ToS of a web site, for instance. People say to me, "But it's not enforced!"... I'd rather you argue that to the judge at your bail hearing.
Instead, they will find some child who used a VPN to access porn, then sue PornHub for failing to validate the child's age.
Is that legal? I have no idea. You'll have to ask six Federalist Society judges on the Supreme Court.
It ain't no China, though. It's a really flimsy attempt to block things. Skype worked perfectly, but not Facetime, even though not having an iPhone for natives was like not owning a Toyota Landcruiser.
That particular porn had negative effects on a lot of people. Not society in full, but trafficking does have a serious negative impact, and demand for porn drives some demand for trafficking.
There human trafficking problem in plenty of activities, from housework to construction, restaurant and agriculture. Would you argue that demand for these activity drive demande for trafficking ?
Age verification probably wouldn't even do this. What would most likely happen is that it would drive more traffic to increasingly less legit sites and make real regulation impossible.
It's like buying alcohol, and then keeping it in water bottles in your fridge and complaining your kid keeps getting drunk. At that point the problem isn't the laws or society, it's you!
Some of them even optimize for showing you porn.
Sure... legislate away the hormones of a teenager lol good luck.