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Comment by twiclo | Hacker News Reader

One of my 5 sources is from Fight the New Drug and you turn to an ad hominem because I guess Mormons can't make good arguments and it's ridiculous to say that people can be addicted to porn. Sounds like you're in denial of that for yourself.

We don't have to choose between two evils. If adults want to watch porn they need to prove they're an adult. You wouldn't say we should stop age verifying people for online gambling just because there are "dark web" gambling websites.

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The first link is the FTC punishing Pornhub for something they did wrong. That is the parent commentator's main point (e.g. it can be regulated), which you keep ignoring.

> You wouldn't say we should stop age verifying people for online gambling just because there are "dark web" gambling websites.

False equivalencies. Gambling and porn have VERY different dynamics to them.

My point is that if we make adults sites harder for adults to access, many people will turn to the unregulated black market, which is much worse. It's much closer than people think: once VPNs are banned or restricted, the next easiest circumvention solution is Tor. We don't need age verification per-site when we have client-side parental controls, which are widely trusted by parents.

Gambling is a system which inherently requires payment, for which it is easy to request a credit card as proof of age. It's also necessary to create an account to track your winnings. For adult content, the main business model is the free ad-supported system with account registration optional. ID verification systems charge about thirty cents per user, which takes a lot of ad views to recoup, so to avoid verification cost on every visit the user must create an account (which is subject to account sharing anyway, and as the article notes, verified accounts are being sold on the black market). Parental controls client-side make much more sense unless your actual goal is to harm the adult industry and increase government surveillance of citizens.

Until there is zero societal stigma towards sex and legal sexual preferences, mandatory age verification for adult content is completely unacceptable.

Mandatory age verification for adult content should be illegal.

Quite. The age verification for social media may actually be worse, because the age requirement is lower, meaning they have to collect personally identifying information on minors. Many young people also don't have ID, particularly in the UK where driving is less common. Actually, many adults don't have ID in general. Every free vBulletin form also just got thirty cents per user more expensive to run.

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