Cause and Effect In Action: After Texas Passes Age Verification, VPN Searches Soar

Many have long pointed out that VPNs can circumvent Canada’s age verification laws. Texas is offering a beautiful demonstration of why this is a strong point.

Bill S-210, Canada’s age verification bill, is a badly written bill authored by a senator who is gradually making the case for why she has no business being a lawmaker in the first place. The bill would bring in mass internet censorship across Canada all under the fake premise of “protecting the children”. To make matters even more comically ridiculous, the bill is backed by the Conservative party – a political party that loves to call itself the stalwart defenders of freedom of expression. It’s about as politically ironic as it gets.

One aspect of this debate that is especially comical is the reaction the bills supporters get when attempting to address the point about how VPN (Virtual Private Network) technology can easily circumvent these efforts in the first place. The criticism is very straight forward: Users of all ages can use a VPN to circumvent any age restriction imposed by the federal government. Arguably, the same can be said for the use of Tor as well, but the criticism still applies.

In response, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne and her team responded by saying that yes, the bill is unable to respond to such technology, but don’t worry, people are too stupid to figure all that out, so it’s no big deal in the end. Later on, her and her team admitted that the bill is, in fact, worthless in that regard, but argued that VPN use is too small, so ignoring this aspect will make all the problems go away on their own. I mean, you really don’t need much more evidence than that to conclude that the senator in question is in way over her head here.

Now, even if you have a surface level of knowledge on how technology works and how people interact with that technology, it becomes immediately obvious how short sighted such counter arguments are. For instance, if using VPN technology isn’t that widespread in adoption now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that when the government gets to censoring otherwise lawful speech that adoption wouldn’t go up. In fact, by erecting barriers, you actually encourage people to start adopting that kind of technology in the first place.

Some people out there reading that will look at that and say that this is merely hypothetical speculation. They might argue that there is also ample reason to believe that when adult websites get blocked that people will just shrug and say, “oh well, that was fun while it lasted” and do other things with their time (cue people who know better laughing at that). The problem with that kind of push back is that this isn’t actually hypothetical speculation – it is actually happening today. We have Texas to thank for providing a real world example of this happening.

Last year, Texas passed HB 1181, that states own version of an age verification law. The legislation is arguably unconstitutional. So, the Free Speech coalition sued to block the implementation of the law. Earlier this month, the 5th circuit court ignored volumes of caselaw and bizarrely declared the bill constitutional. In the process, the court also lifted the injunction that blocked the implementation of the law.

So, in response, Aylo, the parent company of PornHub, blocked all Texas IP addresses from accessing its services. From the TechDirt report by Michael McGrady:

What a day. Texas is now the most populated U.S. state to be geo-blocked by Aylo, the parent company of the popular adult tube site Pornhub.com. With a population of barely over 29.5 million people, residents of the Lone Star State must use a VPN to view porn on Aylo’s network of free and premium websites.

The geo-block comes after the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a Texas age verification law targeting pornography was constitutional. The federal case was brought by Aylo, the parent companies of other adult websites, and the Free Speech Coalition.

Despite the Fifth Circuit completely overlooking decades of Supreme Court precedent indicating that any sort of age verification measure infringes on First Amendment rights, the conservative judges, 2-1, powered through. As Mike Masnick noted in his column on the decision, Judge Patrick Higginbotham – in dissent from the two other judges of the panel – rightfully pointed out that First Amendment protections aren’t thrown out just because Texas tries to be the nanny state. Senior U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra initially ruled the Texas age verification law, House Bill 1181, unconstitutional and issued a preliminary injunction to block the law. Texas won on appeal. Litigation is still ongoing. Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, also filed a lawsuit against Pornhub in Travis County courts alleging violations of House Bill 1181, and seeks millions in damages.

If supporters of Canada’s age verification bill are right, people will react to this by throwing up their hands and admitting defeat before moving on to other things in their lives. The problem is, that’s not what is happening in Texas. As it turns out, the blockade has resulted in an explosion of people researching how to use a VPN to circumvent the block. From Variety:

Searches by Texas users for the term “VPN” jumped more than fourfold after Pornhub and its parent company’s network of other pornography websites disabled access in the state this week, according to Google data.

VPNs, or virtual private networks, establish an encrypted connection between a user and the public internet — and they can also mask the location of user, making it appear as if they’re accessing the internet from another state or country.

A number of Texans evidently have a newfound interest in location-spoofing VPN services, coming after Pornhub and other affiliated adult websites on March 14 blocked access to users in the state to protest Texas’ age-verification law requiring pornography sites to institute age-verification measures to ensure only adults 18 and older are able to access them.

A new message displayed Thursday on Pornhub (and other sites operated by parent company Aylo) to users with internet addresses registered to ISPs in Texas explained that it was disabling access to comply with the law. The company claims it has long supported age-verification access measures, but criticized the Texas law as “ineffective, haphazard and dangerous” because it forces users to provide identification every time they visit an adult-content platform rather than verifying users’ ages on their devices.

“Until the real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas,” the message on Pornhub and other Aylo sites said. “In doing so, we are complying with the law, as we always do, but hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users.”

Of the 20 metro areas tracked by Google, the highest search interest in VPNs over that the past seven days was in Dallas-Ft. Worth, followed by Houston, Austin, Waco-Temple-Bryan and San Antonio.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who follows digital technological trends. Simply browsing the web is the easiest way to access content. When blockades are put in place, that’s when people become motivated to use things like geoblock circumvention tools. There’s always going to be a contingent of users who have always used such technology, so they won’t really even notice a difference, but for others, such technology is very new to them. So, they are going to start researching such technology in the first place.

The other thing to keep in mind is that a bump in Google trends is just the tip of the iceberg here. It’s likely that a lot of those searches come from people who are aware of such technology and already have a general working knowledge of how such technology worked, but probably never really took the plunge into using it. When people talk to each other, recommendations will start circulating via word of mouth after as well. This means that there are going to be people who either don’t use Google to research or use Google to research a specific recommendation afterwards once someone else has done some of that legwork first.

This isn’t the first time people have seen the possibility of the internet they know being disrupted and scrambling to figure out how to use a VPN and which VPN to use. It also will not be the last, either. While all of this is great news for VPN providers who will see increased adoption of their paid services, it points to a much broader problem of why things like age verification bills are so short sighted in the first place. While supporters of Canada’s age verification will likely try and push the narrative that history totally won’t repeat itself here, the only thing that those supporters have at this point is simply crossing their fingers and hoping for the best. Not exactly the most convincing of strategies here.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.