Hacker News Reader

Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

> what would stop anyone from merely hosting porn in Romania or some country that didn't care about US age-verification laws

A government could implement the equivalent of China's great firewall. Even if it doesn't stop everyone, it would stop most people. The main problem I suspect is that it would be widely unpopular in the US or Europe, because (especially younger) people have become addicted to porn and brainrot, and these governments are still democracies.

View on HN

Even China hasn't been remotely successful at banning porn, and it already has the great firewall and porn is illegal there.

That isn’t necessary because porn companies don’t exist to gift orgasms, but to make money. They need US citizens to pay them for premium content and subscriptions, and that dependency means they’ll have to comply with US laws.

The words of someone who does not actually look at pornography. The vast majority of pornography-by-consumption is free / ad-supported. Customers are not "paying" and those ads are usually the bottom of the barrel with regard to sleaziness or legality.

It’s still just a sales funnel for ads or subscriptions. Why do you think porn sites exist?

Plenty of porn exists for free, posted online by models or digital artists. It's archived in places that circumvent copyright, don't require payment or accounts, and are easily accessible.

Sure: models need to advertise to find buyers too, but there's certainly not as many models or rehosts if there's no money to be made anywhere.

pornography is not a profitable industry. even famous participants like 'mia khalifa' only made GBP9.5k (USD 12.8k) lifetime earnings. The average onlyfans has about 21 fans, with an average subscription price of $7.20.

the future of the industry is probably ai slop, personalised ai, and so on

one of the purposes of the porn industry in 00s was money laundering: cash only, large stores with no CCTV, very sparse records, not possible to objectively value why a dvd was being sold for $85

The industry is profitable .. the onlyfans founder is now worth circa $8 billion.

Being grist in the mill of that industry, however, only leads to being ground up for the consumption of others.

> A government could implement the equivalent of China's great firewall. Even if it doesn't stop everyone, it would stop most people.

Porn is not just political information about human right abuses, government overreach or heavily censored overview of concentration camps for "group X". People can live just fine with government censorship buying into any kind of propaganda.

Kids would find a way to access porn though. Whatever it VPNs, tor or USB stick black market. Government cant even win war on drugs and you expect them to successfully ban porn. What a joke.

It's as easy as parents keeping the default router password, a kid logging in and then setting up port forwarding to a device on a port that they're running a server on, tied to their current residential ip, and then pinging their friends that ip and allowing them all to connect and download whatever files or upload whatever files. The peer-to-peer network could really start establishing itself in ephemeral and very hard to track ways. All you need is one kid with access to a vpn to torrent without copyright concerns to seed the network. Or one kid to get its parents to buy a domain and use that as an anchor so that the dns to ip is set behind the scenes for the peers.

Oh but brainrot would not be blocked, how would poor Meta keep making money otherwise?

What will be blocked are news outlets that don't agree with the government propaganda.

eh... they are more like `dumbocracies` with these measures. None of this is to protect children. Except to satisfy rabid parents who think the world needs to serve them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com