I think, given how the porn industry has engaged in a race-to-the-bottom with regards to sensational content, and the fact that smartphones are ubiquitously adopted by children at younger and younger ages -- that it makes perfect sense to burden the industry with the requirement to verify ages of users under penalty of law.
TFA:
> 16-year-old Isabel Hogben described how, by the time she was in 4th grade, she had seen internet porn featuring “simulated incest, bestiality, extreme bondage, sex with unconscious women, gangbangs, sadomasochism and unthinkable physical violence.
> In Louisiana, a new law sponsored by state representative Laurie Schlegel, a sex therapist, requires porn websites to verify the age of users. Schlegel is a Republican, but her bill drew bipartisan support, passing the state legislature 96-1, and has inspired copycat legislation in six other states. Initial signs are that this approach works: Pornhub has withdrawn service entirely in some states that have passed age verification bills.
No website on earth has managed to succeed with Age Verification, except places like us.gov for obvious reasons.
Since the investment cost is infinite, and the cost of an error is legislated to be super high, companies will conclude the rational choice is to cancel service those jurisdictions. Effectively, the end of "legal" porn.
All that will be left is the kind of site that isn't bound by US law, and now you have a much worse situation for the kids with phones.
True, but the "solution" is that kids shouldn't have unfettered smartphone or computer access at 9 years old.
The problem is that a lot of irresponsible parents are giving their kids phones at those ages and making things really difficult for parents who are trying to be responsible.
We really need old-school "You can talk and you can text and that's it" dumbphones back again.
I don’t want to completely throw parents under the proverbial bus here: an awful lot of things depend on smartphones now. My wife has had her high school students break the school’s “no phones” policy because they need to do MFA, watch instructional videos when the school Wi-Fi is down, get stuff out of email, etc. and many kids use apps like Uber to get to/from school or need to use the same phone for some kind of after school job. Yes, you can in theory lock things down but that’s non-trivial to do and it’s not hard to hit exceptions which are not easy to fit into existing parental controls (e.g. just try to limit YouTube to only what videos their teachers use).
I don’t really shed many tears for the commercial porn industry - they at least have some money to spend on compliance – but I do think smartphones will continue to lead kids to make mistakes which can’t be undone. Gross commercial porn can give kids unrealistic ideas but it probably isn’t as damaging as sending something to the wrong person and having it shared around the school, being bullied, etc. and those things don’t have as straightforward a solution as requiring identity checks.
There are students at middle schools here who use Uber / Lyft to get to/from school because their parents can’t accompany them on the subway. Smart door locks, etc. are also common and a surprising number of kids use the assistive features (e.g. background noise on headphones).
I’m not saying it’s great but I see it more as a market failure that parents can’t confidently say they let their kid use a phone without being exposed to the worst of the internet.
One tension is that while there absolutely is a strong pressure to act because of how different things are than in days of postcard illustrations and smutty magazines, any action on traditionally suppressed adult lifestyles inevitably draws in traditionalist activists/lobbies who try to use it as a fresh opportunity to repress those lifestyles again.
There's a tough balance to achieve between responsible social governance and the historical battle between traditionalist communities and modern pluralism.
And then there of course is the challenge of practically enforcing anything like that in a digital world with global permeability. You can try to force companies in US/US-allied countries to do all kinds of things, but what's the gain if The Nation of Xyz or a decentralizing technology leaves the content just as available. All you've done is hurt a local industry with no actual social benefit gained.
In the real world, this stuff is tough to navigate.
It's a Chesterton's Fence issue and an individual vs social harm one. Maybe, just maybe, those traditionally suppressed lifestyles were suppressed because those societies had memories of what happens when they are not suppressed.
Apparently there is some meme on Tick-tock these days asking men how often they think about the Roman Empire. Quite a lot, it appears. Learning about fifth-century Roman society may be instructive. History may rhyme; it may not. What are the risks and benefits?
I am old; I have no dog in this fight either way. Purely intellectual interest.
> All you've done is hurt a local industry with no actual social benefit gained.
No, you have re-deployed resources in more pro-social places. There is a net benefit. Shut down Only Fans, and some of the performers will find work as gardeners or hair-stylists' assistants. Some of the viewers may venture out of their basements as well.
>Shut down Only Fans, and some of the performers will find work as gardeners or hair-stylists' assistants
Hilarious comment if serious. Do you think women who chose to do onlyfans were making good money in whatever job they were doing before that?[0]
How much money do you think gardeners make? Perhaps one of the most comically out of touch statements I've ever seen. Up there with "what could a banana cost michael, 10$?"
>Learning about fifth-century Roman society may be instructive
Like their countless famously failed attempts to police morality? From augustus imposing the lex julia for adultery only to have the law laughed at because he fucked anything that moved? To the early christian empires acting like worshipping the wrong god was treason. Moral policing is and has always been a farce at best, a vector for general oppression at worst. See: Iran women's protests.
How about you penalize parents lack of parenting their children before you start moral policing other people's lives. Silly that any adult is going to get barriers put up in their way to protect and do the job of some reckless parents who shouldn't have had kids in the first place. Insane policy. Pornhub should be responsible for the content the 12 children you thoughtlessly popped out see on the internet???
Maybe pay people more and provide universal child care and reduce the gilded age inequality that requires both parents work to the bone to provide for a kid in the first place? Maybe then they wouldn't be so inclined to pawn their children off on the internet and then go around on moral crusades because they decide legislators need to parent for them while they work.
> Maybe, just maybe, those traditionally suppressed lifestyles were suppressed because those societies had memories of what happens when they are not suppressed.
That would be more plausible if we saw that all mature cultures ended up with the same or similar norms. But we don't. Instead, we see a rich variety of norms across history and cultures, but also many examples of territorialism where specific cultures try to impose their idiosyncratic norms on others. And maybe there's good to be found even in that (uniformity is easier to govern), but it does run against the pluralist principles of the modern west.
> And then there of course is the challenge of practically enforcing anything
I feel at least some of the proponents of these restrictions want the challenge. This will effectively be another war against an idea, which justifies endless expansion of power and intrusion since the previous expansion and intrusion didn't resolve the problem.
Right now we are at the point in the game where there is a search for the thin edge of the wedge. It's children this time, but there's always terrorism, drugs, organized crime or national security as options if that doesn't work.
