Aylo, parent company of Pornhub, said that they are looking at blocking Florida over it’s impending age verification laws.
One of the common refrains we hear from supporters of bad internet laws these days is that platforms can’t afford to block whole portions of the general population. Whether it is through the Online Streaming Act where smaller streaming platforms are saying that they have no shot in being able to comply with such laws or the Online News Act where the failed argument was that Meta would never block news links in Canada.
The reality is that not only will platforms block a whole jurisdiction over a poorly written law, but it is actually happening at an increasing rate. We’ve already reported on Aylo/Pornhub blocking Utah over it’s badly written age verification law. Twitch, for it’s part, exited South Korea over terrible a “network fees” law.
What’s more, it doesn’t take much to find other examples of this. For instance, last month, Aylo blocked Texas and Indiana over their own respective badly written age verification laws.
Texas has a population of over 30 million people. So, the argument that a country or a state has too many people and a major platform can’t afford to lose that population really doesn’t hold water. At best, smaller websites will get wiped out, further solidifying the largest players market domination which, honestly, isn’t exactly the greatest outcome for anyone involved.
What’s more, the number of people blocked by Aylo is seemingly set to go up even more. Florida passed HB 3. Among other things, the law requires age verification before people can access an adult oriented website. Arstechnica is reporting that the panhandle state could soon join the list of states blocked by the platform:
But Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo, has taken notice, with a spokesperson confirming to Ars that “we are aware of the passage into law of HB 3 in Florida, which unfortunately fails to protect minors online.”
“To be clear, we agree on the goal of keeping minors away from such content,” Aylo’s spokesperson told Ars. “We do not want minors to have access to adult entertainment content designed for adults.”
However, Aylo views Florida requiring adult sites to verify ages by checking users’ IDs as being just as problematic as efforts in states like Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Utah, and Virginia. Aylo argues that these laws don’t stop anyone from accessing porn without ID but instead push the majority of users to seek out non-compliant adult sites that don’t ask for ID. In Louisiana, for example, Pornhub traffic dropped by 80 percent after the site began requiring ID.
“These people did not stop looking for porn,” Aylo’s spokesperson said. “They just migrated to darker corners of the Internet that don’t ask users to verify age, that don’t follow the law, that don’t take user safety seriously, and that often don’t even moderate content. In practice, the laws have just made the Internet more dangerous for adults and children.”
To protest laws requiring ID, Aylo has taken the drastic step of blocking users from accessing Pornhub in several states, and Florida could be next if the law actually takes effect on January 1.
“It is our hope that before this ill-conceived and poorly crafted law goes into effect, the government will recognize the ineffectiveness of similar copycat laws in other states, such as Texas and several others before that,” Aylo’s spokesperson told Ars.
As some Canadian readers know, Canada has its own badly written age verification law in the form of Bill S-210. In response, Pornhub openly contemplated blocking Canada as well in response.
Ultimately, what is happening in the age verification law debates is really putting an increasingly large number of nails in the coffin of the argument that platforms can’t afford to shut down in a given jurisdiction. These are international companies we are dealing with. They have a very international presence and being forced to block one country isn’t the end of the world for them by any means.
The real harm in passing a bad internet law is the jurisdiction in question harms itself. Any economic benefits and spinoff jobs that result in having that platform available in a given location just evaporates overnight. If someone is generating hundreds of thousands on a platform like, say, YouTube, and a country passes a bad law that renders it senseless to continue in that country, then that person and all the people they hired gets screwed over. It’s possible that person can adapt to another platform still operating in the country, but there are certainly no certainties on such a wildly huge change in the business plan.
Then, there is the flip side to all of this. If you are someone who thinks that Pornhub blocking everyone is no big loss and it will get people to stop watching such content, you are in for a rude awakening. People will look elsewhere to find such content. Whether it is through VPN services, TOR, or even lesser known websites. Heck, I wouldn’t at all be surprised if they get their content through other mediums. People who are into that content are just going to be looking elsewhere just like shutting down Napster didn’t stop online copyright infringement.
Ultimately, the net effect of pushing a platform out of a jurisdiction is that all you are driving away is the economic benefits that it offered. It hurts the consumer, it hurts the economy, it hurts those creating jobs, and it hurts the creators locally. You are beating up your own economy by pushing for these kinds of laws. I don’t care if you don’t like people who post on TikTok or produce porn on Pornhub. The fact remains that content creators generate revenue at the end of the day and you are turning down all those economic benefits in the process. If those economic benefits aren’t going to happen locally, then those economic benefits are going to go elsewhere, plain and simple.
The question then becomes how much damage will politicians cause to their own economy before they realize that they are hurting their own constituents in pushing these ill-conceived laws. In all likelihood, some politicians may never learn and the only thing stopping them is their constituents voting them out.
