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Kids could always get jazz mags from friends, find VHS tapes, be told stories, see topless women etc.
The difference here is that it's easier, but that's partly caused by indifference and technical illiteracy.
If it was a serious enough problem to warrant government intervention the larger public would be championing this cause.
They aren't.
That's not even withstanding that soft porn is often just people showing their bodies, which should never be a problem.
> They aren't.
Nearly 70% of Americans support tougher laws restricting children’s access to adult content online—up from 65% in 2013.
Six in ten young men (ages 18–29) support stricter online restrictions for adult content, a shift from an even split in 2013
You gotta get out of your bubble
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/jul/10/young-men-b...
"In the 2000s, AEI was the most prominent think tank associated with American neoconservatism.[5] Irving Kristol, widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of neoconservatism, was a senior fellow at AEI and the AEI issues an 'Irving Kristol Award' in his honour.[58][59] Paul Ryan has described the AEI as "one of the beachheads of the modern conservative movement"
If there's independent studies great, especially world wide (the US can be a bit insular), but as someone in the UK I dont see anything but disdain for ID checking age-gating.
Even other political parties are saying they'll roll it back if they get in power, which if they're betting the farm on that policy, must have considerable public influence.
> I wish these sites would voluntarily try to put some age-gating, but considering that a huge percentage of their traffic is underage, they have no incentive to do so.
That mandating a self-identification system (of the site, not the user) would solve 90% of the underage user problem exposes these governments' user-identification campaigns as pretext.
Where is the evidence that it is bad for people?
Where is the evidence that it is bad for children?
Where is the evidence that it is addictive?
Where is the evidence that it causes ED?
These things are commonly believed by "traditionally-minded" people, but I have yet to see a reputable study that shows any of this. Indeed, recent studies have shown that "porn addiction" is effectively a myth: it's basically just people who think that using porn is bad, still using porn (because they have normal, healthy, human urges), and feeling guilty about it.
Your entire argument rests on that "I think so".
Let's for instance count the number of people that these websites have killed versus the number that guns kill. The counts are about 0 and 40,000+ per year respectively. There is no statistical sense in which the government has their priorities straight.