from the don’t-blame-us-for-ruining-Gov-Huckabee’s-husband’s-morning-wood dept
It has been a busy day for Arkansas.
Pornhub.com geo-blocked IP addresses in Arkansas in the latest protest against unworkable age verification laws. Arkansas is the fifth state to have an age-gating statute enter force and is the fourth to be geo-blocked by the parent company of Pornhub, the Montréal-based firm MindGeek owned by Ethical Capital Partners in Ottawa. With a population of about 3 million people, the block on Arkansas adds to the growing number of blocked people in the United States — Earth’s largest consumer base for legal and consensual pornography. And, as we are seeing across the board, people aren’t happy with the block and it isn’t like these laws are going to stop people from watching porn. VPNs are gaining popularity, and not all porn sites are following these laws.
But, who is to blame for the Pornhub geo-block? Pornhub or Ethical Capital Partners? The state? It’s basic economics, folks. Generally speaking, reasonable regulations often make sense for various industries. Without government regulation, we too frequently end up with early Industrial Revolution-style labor quagmires: people get exploited, customers are at the whim of unaccountable executives, and a market ends up monopolizing. But those are general regulations that apply across the board to protect labor and customers.
There is a huge difference when regulations prevent entry or exit from a market for a variety of reasons, or when they target specific types of companies. The age verification laws in these states are textbook cases of misinformed regulation. In my time reporting on the porn industry, I have seen time and again do-gooder politicians who claim to have a moral imperative to “protect the kids.” Protecting the kids, in the eyes of such politicians, means restricting access to adult content and openly censoring otherwise First Amendment-protected forms of free speech and expression.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed into law Senate Bill 66 requiring a government identification or a personal identification document to verify one’s age in order to wank. The state legislature, which is dominated by a Republican supermajority, claimed that the bill was a “bipartisan” show of concern for minors. Truthfully, this “bipartisanship” is exclusively based on a political necessity for Democrats in the minority to effect any sort of legislative change that is not blocked by the Q-anon laced policies of Gov. Sanders and her cronies in the state legislature.
It’s clear that Pornhub shouldn’t be blamed for this new development in the ongoing drama related to age verification in the United States. In a blog post, Pornhub said the reason they’re blocking entire states is the way these “new laws are executed by lawmakers is ineffective and puts users’ privacy at risk.” That’s absolutely true. The majority of these laws don’t consider the impact of potential data bloat, security risks, and other fucked-up ideas.
Also, the enforcement of these laws isn’t consistent or uniform. Given the nature of the federal system, there are clear shortcomings in the ability of U.S. states to effectively enforce these laws in an equitable manner. But what age verification laws try to do is regulate interstate commerce while lacking the constitutional prerogative to do so. Only Congress and the federal government through an act of Congress can regulate interstate commerce in ways that are presented in these age verification bills — age estimation tech, AI-assisted biometrics, and simple interventions such as requesting sensitive personally identifiable information over openly available, non-sensitive personally identifiable information that can be found via social media.
As I’ve written for Techdirt before, Pornhub and its ownership group are on record advocating for device-based age verification solutions that try to retain as little data as possible. They say so in the blog post, and a partner for Ethical Capital Partners told me the same thing several times in calls and texts throughout my reportage on the age verification push in Utah. This is additionally the case for a variety of other sites that want to comply with the law and be viewed as ethical, transparent, and responsible. But, there is no simple solution for ensuring trust and safety policies are effective on porn sites or social media platforms that permit uncensored nudity, like Reddit or OnlyFans.
Age verification laws are currently being challenged in federal district courts across the country as violations of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The Free Speech Coalition, a trade group representing the adult entertainment industry, headlines plaintiff classes pressing courts in Utah and Louisiana to issue permanent injunctions against the implementation and enforcement of age verification laws. In Arkansas, NetChoice filed a lawsuit against the state government asking a federal judge to block the Social Media Safety Act, an age verification measure requiring a user or a parent to submit identification material in order to create new accounts. Collectively, these proposals are simply unworkable ideological statements that have little chance of surviving judicial review. Plus, it goes to show how backward conservative politicians can be on free speech topics.
The age verification law enters into force tomorrow, August 1.
Michael McGrady is the contributing editor of AVN.com.
Disclosure: The author is a member of the Free Speech Coalition. He wasn’t compensated by the coalition or its members to write this column.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, adult content, age verification, arkansas, geoblocking, porn, porn license, pornhub, sarah huckabee sanders
Companies: ethical capital partners, mindgeek, pornhub
