Hacker News Reader

Comment by msftgreed | Hacker News Reader

So a state (or municipality or anyone capable of making laws) has the ability to say, "You don't meet our local laws, take down your URL" now?

This is going to be a real problem when states start nuking whole parts of the internet from orbit. A state has a law against conversion therapy and starts to remove sites with that? A state has a law against trans people? Or abortion? Or medical misinformation? Suddenly we just start purging sites back and forth?

Battlegrounds end up as torn up, muddy, desolate places. Turning the domain registry into a battleground is a bad idea. Over the long term, no one wins if we choose to fight there.

View on HN

No. If a site doesn't want to comply with the state, they can geoblock. That's what pornhub does.

In the US, if you used a US domain or registrar, this is possible. If you are Dutch and registered a .nl domain with a Dutch registrar, this is not possible.

I thought this was always the case?

But what people do instead is to disable access for people from that specific state.

This is a pretty clear violation of the First Amendment, but the current SCOTUS doesn't care about the Constitution.

Multiple conservative SCOTUS justices openly admit to taking bribes from parties with cases before them.

I believe the current precedent is that porn is not speech.

Porn is speech. This has been litigated several times by SCOTUS.

Obscenity is not speech.

It appears that in Texas, porn is considered obscenity.

Texas can't make that decision unilaterally. They'll have the First Amendment to contend with.

Besides, that's not even what this case is about. This is about access to pornography, not about the right to produce or disseminate it with or to consenting adults. Even if the latter rights are protected under the First Amendment, the courts have never said that Federal and state governments cannot restrict minors from accessing it.

Wrong. Porn is considered protected speech unless it is considered “obscene” (which is an incredibly difficult bar to meet), and even possession of obscene material in one’s home is protected.

C’mon, people, these issues are trivial to look up the facts about. There’s no excuse for ignorance here. https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/obscenity-and-pornog...

So nobody has ever gone to jail for possessing child porn?

Of course CSAM isn’t protected. This story isn’t about CSAM though.

So porn isn't protected speech?

Porn is protected speech, with the exception of CSAM and "obscene" materials. You do understand how exceptions work, don't you?

If you have further questions, ask an attorney who specializes in First Amendment law. I also recommend law school.

In Texas, all porn is obscene.

Says who? Please provide a legal citation or at least an allegation.

I mean the US works like this, it isn't suprising a US state also does.

If someone from the US does something illegal on your site (which is legal in your country), depending on how much they want you will end up in a US prison.

Before the US decided that betting online was OK, betting sites had travel advisories for their employees not to travel to the US.

It seems like it's pretty easy to comply. Pornhub and others don't have any problems complying with TX.

According to this pornhub is blocked in 25 states including Texas.

https://mashable.com/article/pornhub-blocked-states-2025

You wrote this in the passive voice; it doesn't say who is doing the blocking.

Pornhub itself is doing the blocking; it uses geolocation and denies services to IP addresses from jurisdictions with age verification laws. The laws are usually not structured so as to require a third party such as an ISP to block noncompliant sites; instead, the governments of the states with those laws can sue the porn sites and their service providers (Verisign in the case of .com domains).

> You wrote this in the passive voice

I used the language of the link.

> The explicit tube site Pornhub is now blocked in 25 U.S. states

I had assumed that the states were blocking Pornhub but reading between the lines in the linked article it does imply it's not the states are not applying technical blocks.

The states have applied intentionally onerous requirements onto these sites with full knowledge that would most likely not comply making them de facto blocks. You wouldn't be fooled if a gangster said "that's some nice kneecaps you got there, it would be a shame if something happened to them" so I don't know why we are acting so naive about Texas and co.

I can't tell if it's Texas or Porn sites that are supposed to be the gangster in this metaphor.

> so I don't know why we are acting so naive about Texas and co.

It's a bad metaphor. I'm just saying they don't have to directly say what it is they want these sites to do to coerce them to do it.

They want them to stop letting kids in their state have access to their porn. It's up to Pornhub how to implement that and Pornhub decided to block all of Texas.

This seems like a reasonable ask and a reasonable response to me, so I don't understand who the bad guy is supposed to be here.

Right, because they complied. Which was easy for them to do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com