The negative impacts of age verification laws are continuing with Indiana and Kentucky also being blocked by Pornhub.
Back in February, I reported on Pornhub openly contemplating blocking Canada over Canada’s badly written age verification laws. Age verification laws are basically a social experiment by busy-bodies who want to get rid of all things icky icky ew ew from the internet all the while ignoring all the related evidence in the process so they can push their ideologically driven legal ideas.
Generally speaking, age verification laws are hugely problematic for a host of reasons. One of the big reasons is the fact that it’s generally unconstitutional (both in Canada and the United States). It’s government mandating the censorship of otherwise legal speech. A second big reason is that it’s ineffective because anonymous tools such as VPNs can easily thwart the blocking measures. A third big reason is that it’s a security nightmare as it puts highly detailed and sensitive information into massive databases that has a history of data leaks and hacking, opening people up to blackmail. In other words, not only does it not solve any of the problems they set out to solve, but it actually makes everyone involved worse off.
Pornhub, for its part, recognizes the security nightmare that such laws represent. Already, it has blocked several states including Utah, and Texas. PC Mag notes that these blocks are expanding into other states who are moving forward with this thought experiment:
Pornhub will soon be blocked in Indiana and Kentucky amid a battle over the states’ age-verification laws.
The states join Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Virginia, and Utah, where the adult site is also blocked, unless you try to get around it with a VPN (more on that below). It’s also poised to happen in Florida, where an age-verification law goes into effect on Jan. 1.
Access to the site will be blocked in Indiana starting June 27 and in Kentucky starting July 10.
The Indiana law, SB17, requires sites that offer adult content to “use a reasonable age verification method to prevent a minor from accessing an adult oriented website.” Detractors argue that it could have a chilling effect on free speech since people may fear having their identities exposed should a site like Pornhub ever be breached. The California-based Free Speech Coalition and a group of adult platforms, including Pornhub parent company Aylo, have sued, arguing that “laws like SB17 have effectively functioned as state censorship.”
If anything, this shows how blocking jurisdictions idiotic enough to enact such laws has become the default response for sites like Pornhub. A practical side effect to all of this is that it teaches users to use a VPN service so they can circumvent government mandated censorship in the process. That, of course, isn’t really a bad thing in and of itself, but the circumstances involved in that are quite unfortunate.
The move really only adds further evidence against those who think that platforms can’t live on without the audience of every jurisdiction, so therefore, they will bend to the whims of whatever the government does. Pornhub is showing how that’s not how the real world works. Platforms can, and will, block jurisdictions if the government decides to play stupid games.
If there is anyone out there that still think that Pornhub would never block Canada, well, Pornhub has already blocked several populous states in the US. Personally, I don’t think things will be any different in Canada.
Probably the dumbest thing of all is that if Pornhub ends up blocking Canada, supporters of age verification laws will be stupid enough to declare victory afterwards. There’s no victory here. They are teaching people to use higher grade privacy tools, making it harder to enforce any law online, however well intentioned the effort is. In the process, people will end up being endangered as a result as shady third party sites will be the ones to fill the void for those who don’t know how anonymous services work. The only people who are thrilled by such a scenario are malware developers and criminals. That’s it.
The worst part about all of this is knowing that appeals to reason in all of this will continue to fall on deaf ears – including this one. Evidence and expert opinion never mattered to the people pushing these laws. They have their own personal feelings and politics on their side. If politics can triumph over logic, evidence, and reason in the Bill C-11, Bill C-18, and the Digital Services Tax, what’s stopping it from triumphing in this debate as well?
