Hey— performer & small site owner here. Most of the hypothetical cases in the media (and these comments) relate to Pornhub, OF, etc— companies that definitely can afford to implement age verification even if it hurts their bottom line. This totally misses the vast majority of porn sites that are very small, operate on licensed technology that may not even be maintained, and would have their ~low-5-digit annual income nuked by the cost of compliance. In these cases, geo-blocking states one by one as they implement these laws becomes the only option. Yeah VPNs exist, but HN users faaaaar over-estimate the technical knowledge & ability of the average American used to having the net served to them on a silver platter.
> Yeah VPNs exist, but HN users faaaaar over-estimate the technical knowledge & ability of the average American used to having the net served to them on a silver platter.
We can evaluate this by considering the results of DNS blocking ThePirateBay.
Most of the time they'll go on Twitter or the noncompliant websites instead. That being said, published numbers have shown VPN subscriptions skyrocket. Public tech skills aren't what they were in the 2000s, but people who can't/won't verify ID are motivated. It is a powerful force after all.
I hope you’re right! There’s certainly nothing inherent stopping a widespread shift toward VPN usage and other technical work-arounds that have been part and parcel of internet usage in many countries for decades.
The regulatory burdens on most companies have been gradually increasing, to the point that it is very difficult to run companies with <100 (some might say <1000) employees in most non-software industries. I am sorry to hear that it will negatively impact you, but you don't have the most sympathetic story, and nobody seems to care about this issue anyway, so there's little hope of reprieve, and you'll likely just have to bear it or quit.
As a performer and small site owner, am I to understand that you usually sell sexual material and you don't perform any check to make sure that they are not kids? How are you making sure that users are of age other than the "I am 18: ENTER" button? Maybe you take credit cards and can check their age through that? Do you take crypto or wallets that don't require 18+?
I have kids and try very hard to keep them from inappropriate material online.
The real dangers aren’t dedicated porn sites, but poorly managed social media sites. You can’t just block the domain.
In many cases, the bad material comes from peers. Kids have always talked about “bad” things, but the internet super charges it.
I generally support these efforts, but I’m also very cynical they help.
Politicians focus on the problems they control, like rules for sites that rigorously follow the laws and fit in a clear category. They care far less about the grey areas where the most harm is often done.
I think this is a good thing. I’d feel a lot better if these efforts were combined with rigorous privacy protections.
For example, third party identity verification services should be civilly liable for privacy breeches, and required to carry insurance to meet the obligations.
I tend to think that this challenge posed by "mixed" domains, partly unobjectionable but partly inappropriate, will only become more prevalent. A couple of thoughts:
1. Filtering at the DNS level will never be enough. You'll always need to have the capability for the browser or user agent to do filtering, since the user agent has the context to know the full URI as well as other things needed for filtering. The OS admin (parent, school IT admin etc) will need to be able to block all user agents except the ones that have the reporting and filtering capabilities tuned to the admin's requirements. This is the direction Windows is heading, but it is very rough.
2. I wonder if more domains could do what Google, Bing, Youtube etc do and permit a safe version to be requested at the DNS level. I personally would like to be able to do so with Reddit, Twitter and more.
The absolute worst domain for mixed content is google.com. Google has it's own internal internet. Searching for inappropriate images on Google images (using "safe" terms), and downloading the cached image is a powerful workaround.
Ok, there are a few worse ones. But it's pretty bad.
I’m curious if Apple Wallet will provide a framework for future privacy protecting age verification nationwide after securing the ability to load US Passports into Apple Wallet, since Driver’s licenses in Apple Wallet is such a patchwork and they seem to be a trusted method of doing verification without submitting your information to some sketchy porn website.
Would it not be reasonable and safe and private to implement age verification through login.gov? An Oauth implementation that knows your identity and age can produce a verifiable token that attests your age but not identity. The only way your identity would leak would be if both the porn site and the oauth retain the tokens (which they would both claim not to do else no one would use this), and the attacker gets access to both.
I know it's unlikely to happen because of America's (misguided IMO) extreme distaste for digital government ID, but it seems like the current solution (people uploading pictures of their driver's license to porn websites) is worse in every possible way.
You need something like Verifiable Credentials to do this properly imo. You don't want something like OAuth because the login service knows which websites you're requesting the login from.
I'm not suggesting that people actually authenticate to Pornhub using Login.gov's oauth, they would continue to auth (or not) as they do now. Login.gov can issue a token saying, in essence, "A user authenticated to me, and that user over 21, but I'm not going to identify them, I'll just give you a random GUID so this token will be unique".
edit to add more details, since I'm thinking it through: the token would need to include the issue date and be signed obviously, and would be ephemeral. Properly implemented, it could be done entirely in the browser (Firefox would have a "age verification provider" pull-down) in way that's transparent to the user and both private and secure. And since you have to be 18 to get a credit card, essentially any service you pay for with a credit card in your own name ought to be able to attest your age, even if it hasn't done KYC or scanned a government ID.
I'm a Texan and can't say I'm particularly a fan of the state politics or the current US Supreme Court, but at the same time, I can't say that this law particularly bothers me. I don't have children, and so I don't know if I can really understand what parents are dealing with in trying to ensure that their children are kept away from undesirable material, but it does seem rather difficult; I certainly don't envy them.
Its bullshit a kid can buy a vpn without an ID for 3$ and skip any restriction, and even without that 90% of international porn sites, so the law fixes nothing but opens a slippery slope, whats next a law saying US needs a "Great Firewall" to protect the children from international deviancy.
And it also just opens the possibility for centralized ID verification services being breached and tieing identities to their more personal vices, its only a matter of time till a ID services gets exploited and a bunch of peoples identities and the sites they use are exploited.
In general any legal argument of the form: People will break the law, so there is no point in the law, is bullshit. Imagine any law and you will see how ridiculous it is.
"Making stealing with guns is illegal, people will use facemasks and file gun identifiers"
"Adding security features to money is pointless, counterfeiters can always "
"Adding locks to doors is pointless, if an thief wants to they will picklock it or copy your key"
"making alcohol illegal is pointless, kids can present fake ids or ask their parents..."
murder illegal is pointless
Not a good analogy because people don't inherently crave firearms as an inescapable aspect of the human condition. They do crave sex, food and, by most anthropological accounts, drugs. When we try to artificially restrict these innate desires we consistently see people reject those restrictions in large numbers, oftentimes leading them to fulfil those needs in worse ways than the ways that were limited. And only the most repressive regimes/social orders are able to (mostly) quell that perpetual rebellion, but those are not systems anyone I know would want live under.
Kids don't go through the hoops to buy and install a VPN just to access porn. If they were not exposed to it in the first place, which is very easy without a VPN, then they wont have the interest to get one.
Kids were using VPNs and proxies when I was in school in the 2000s to access Myspace, flash games and comics. There are free ones that are spyware + hijack your PC for use in a botnet.
> Kids don't go through the hoops to buy and install a VPN just to access porn.
When I hosted a Minecraft server, I routinely got DDoS'd by gradeschoolers. I have little doubt they could be tunneling thru a VPN in short order - because they did that too.
So the Texas porn law also removes hormones and curiosity? Every kid who has ever used a search engine has typed in the word fuck to see what comes back. But instead of clicking on the first link of peoplefucking.com and stopping they'll just click on peoplefucking.fr. Then there will be demands that all websites now must be approved by the government to protect the children
As someone who went through hoops to disable filtering back in the 90s when that was the solution, yes they do. VPNs are free and can be installed on a device in about 5 minutes.
You will need to upload your ID to post on social media. Bills like that have already been introduced. Lawmakers have already said this is their intention.
We are going to "think of the children" ourselves into needing to give every site our ID, or more, just to use the internet.
Probably so - I've long lost the thread of what most of this is about. For instance, the state recently passed a law requiring that the ten commandments be posted in every classroom. And I had to stop and think - how many of these legislators themselves feel like they should be bound by said commandments? I'd suspect hardly any, based on their behavior.
One difference is that there are absolutely no people involved with the current political power structure who are openly saying their end goal is to marry dogs.
"“Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
That’s an insane leap of what I said. Like the opposite of what I said. Legalizing gay marriage is giving people more rights, not restricting them like what the court is doing here.
Because .... ITS A SLIPPERY SLOPE, that the republicans in charge and religious right wing have shown they are perfectly OK with pushing for, shit its funny how project 2025 is like 60% implemented and people are still acting like its all some conspiracy and this weird religious right wing shit isnt actually happening
"IT IS A SLIPPERY SLOPE! First we gave women rights, then black people rights, and now we're trying to give trans people rights and rights to illegal immigrants!"
To be clear, I support all of those things, but the point I'm making is that saying it's a slippery slope is a bad argument because A) the next steps are often based on opinion and not fact and B) what one person sees as a slippery slope another person sees as progress and growth.
I'm not arguing in favor of this Texas bill (I have pretty mixed feelings about it honestly). I'm just saying the argument the first person made is a bad argument.
We’re already sliding down the slippery slope. Claiming I’m arguing in bad faith is just helping the people that are pushing us down it. A slippery slope isn’t a bad thing if it involves people getting more rights.
I also think it’s somewhat ironic that my simple statement that started this conversation has been flagged. Free speech really is done in the US.
Banning kids from using social media would probably have a much more significant positive impact on their mental development. Obviously kids browsing Pornhub is not a good thing, but sites like TikTok expose them to much more traumatizing violent material, and of course turns them into quick dopamine-seeking zombies that are glued to their smartphones.
Frankly speaking, even for underage teenagers the most harmful thing about porn is the potential for addiction, not the content itself.
A note on what the future will look like and how we'll get there.
[Justice] Thomas’s invention of “partially protected” speech,
that somehow means you can burden those for which it
is protected, is particularly insidious because
it’s infinitely expandable. Any time the government wants
to burden speech, it can simply argue that the burden is built
into the right itself—making First Amendment protection
vanish exactly when it’s needed most.
This isn’t constitutional interpretation;
it’s constitutional gerrymandering.
The archive link
shared by heythere22 (which seems to be a different story) discusses this.
The published plan from the heritage foundation includes a few more steps: (1) redefine obscenity to include pornography, effectively banning it via interstate commerce laws (2) extend this to anything that could “be harmful to minors”, which will certainly include information about groups they don’t like, starting with LGBTQ+.
Considering another of today's rulings came down in favor of religious opt-outs for kids in public schools, and that that case came out specifically because parents didn't want their kids exposed to books with LGBTQ characters in them, then yeah—I'd say we're scarily close to redefining an entire class of people's existence as obscene.
(Never mind the fact that other recent anti-LGBTQ rulings and policies have heavily implied as much, but I don't think they've been quite so explicit. Yet.)
> Transgender people will see their existence denied and their rights stripped away under Project 2025. The authors equate ‘transgender ideology’ to pornography, calling for it to be outlawed. While the far-right policy agenda cannot directly ban transgenderism, it aims to do so indirectly by labeling it as pornography, and then outlawing pornography itself – effectively erasing transgender identity from the U.S.
So pornhub needs to see how many terabytes of content they host and use AI to generate 2x more terabytes of cat pictures and add them to a compliance tab on their home page now?
Seems annoying but not impossible to do.
Edit: I am happy to build a cat pic to porn ratio audit company if anyone is interested. I want to participate in the funniest regulatory process this will create
doubly so because you can create the cat pictures and make them technically accessible just by hosting them but you don't have to provide equal means of access between the cat pictures and the "cat" pictures. Users are guided to the content that they're actually there for and anyone who actually wants to see feline photos can navigate to their URLs manually. Every pic uploaded triggers generating another cat pic (or subtly altering one that exists) and now no minors are protected but your operating costs have gone up by a little bit and the government has established that it gets to decide what is appropriate for minors and can use violence to force the entire internet to meet that definition.
> So a site just needs to generate enough content until its under that threshold?
No. That alone is highly unlikely to prevent performative lawsuits from state attorney generals. Especially (but not limited to) AGs who are intent on satisfying their culture war kink.
I am not a lawyer and am not behind a PC atm, but didn't Rowan v. USPS determine that the receiver of mail has sole discretion about if the material they received is pornographic or not?
> The addressee of postal mail has unreviewable discretion to decide whether to receive further material from a particular sender, and a vendor does not have a constitutional right to send unwanted material to an unreceptive addressee.
It's not necessarily that the receiver has the sole right to determine if the material is pornographic or whatever, its that the receiver of mail has the right to decide to no longer receive material and that the sender doesn't have a right to force its delivery through the mail.
The form to prevent someone from sending you mail you don't want is a PS Form 1500. This form starts off saying:
> If you are receiving unwanted sexually oriented advertisements coming through the mail to your home or business
But, you can still just file it against say a roofer sending you unwanted advertising or whatever. The USPS isn't allowed to challenge your personal determination that you're receiving unwated sexually oriented advertisements. Maybe you personally find roofers sexy and are trying to avoid being around roofers and having their services offered at your home. USPS isn't allowed to judge.
Republicans have slowly been moving toward anything LGBTQ being reclassified as "obscene" "pretty much" as defense for what courts consider shifts from day to day, as more right wing get put into positions of powers specifically RELIGIOUS right wing people, the courts have been more than willing to keep redefining what things were previously meant to mean.
Let me start off saying I'm not a fan of this law. I don't think these requirements are workable with current technology, and I don't necessarily agree with the goals or that the goals are worth the side effects of the regulations.
> Can a state now require you to verify your age and identity to read a newspaper they don't like?
Most states have laws in place that regulate the sale and distribution of pornography and other "obscene" materials. This has been true for a long, long time. So yes, states have had the ability to require you to show ID to get a "newspaper" they don't like, assuming that newspaper is actually just pornography/obscenity. I don't think most people would argue Pornhub are news sites though.
I understand the point you're trying to make. However, I wanted to point out that Wikipedia being one-third porn/obscene content is unlikely in the extreme.
It's not really that unlikely. In the exact same brief upholding the Texas Porn ID law they're arguing that states have the power to decide what is obscene or not; they're setting up the blocks for saying things like any LGBT content is inherently obscene. This is especially clear in another ruling posted today [1] where the supreme court argues that parents have a right to fully withhold children from any LGBT content they might experience from school.
. Whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
. Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law,
. Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
Clearly the whole of Wikipedia is not trying to appeal to purient interests of the average person. I don't think much of the content of Wikipedia is describing sexual content in a patently offensive way, and I'd argue it has serious political and scientific value.
Even in this description you deferred to your own personal interpretation when you said "I don't think much of the content of Wikipedia is describing sexual content in a patently offensive way". Someone might, or might find it politically expedient to pretend that they do. After all, what's "offensive" is arbitrary.
What counts as obscene has notably not been defined.
"Contemporary community standards" and "lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value" are so vague as to be useless. Whose community? Which standards? How many people have to be offended by something? How many people have to find value in it for it to be serious?
> In 1957, two associates of acclaimed poet Allen Ginsberg were arrested and jailed for selling his book "Howl and Other Poems" to undercover police officers at a beatnik bookstore in San Francisco. Eventually the California Supreme Court declared the literature to be of "redeeming social value" and therefore not classifiable as "obscene". Because the poem "Howl" contains pornographic slang and overt references to drugs and homosexuality, the poem was (and is) frequently censored and confiscated; however, it remains a landmark case.
The Simpsons was considered concerningly off-color in the 1990s; I remember quite a bit of pearl clutching about it, to the point of them getting into a bit of a feud with George and Barbara Bush. Now it's positive family values TV of "serious artistic value".
Most of what's on Pornhub is considered pornography but not obscenity currently, but that could change on a dime.
Or in anti-porn and anti-vpn startups. If you suggest teenagers will buy VPNs and we should monetize that, it should set some alarms to question your ethos.
I think plenty of legal adults have zero interest in having a link tied to their porn consumption. The never ending stream of data leakage announcements should make it clear that if the data is collected, you have to assume it will become public. VPN at least puts a layer of indirection on that.
This will just drive people to non-compliant foreign sites. They just killed their own adult industry, who is gonna take their business and taxes elsewhere
I think your assumption that Texas cares about its porn industries is incorrect. Pornhub is a Canadian company. Afaik it's the #1 porn site, I could be wrong. I assume if they don't comply, their DNS host will be blocked in Texas. Registries of porn sites are readily available. (I use them in my hosts file blocking). So, my guess is that the likely step will be block all of them until they prove they have ID enforcement.
> I assume if they don't comply, their DNS host will be blocked in Texas.
I'm guessing you mean blocking their entire NS host. It would be a massive overreach and would block every site they're authoritative for.
It's one more thing on the rapidly growing Unconstitutional=Okay stack. Cherry-picked courts are routinely fine with that. But it wouldn't stop lawsuits from registrars, site owners and other parties harmed thru collateral damage.
Just blocking PH's current IP would take down over 40 sites.
> Conservatives claim to hate Chinese-style internet censorship
What they hate about Chinese internet censorship isn't the scope and pervasiveness, it’s who specifically controls it and what specific decisions are made.
I don't think the big-business adult industries is particularly present in Texas, and the independent creators who are in Texas leaving if they are able or being forced out of work if not is probably an active goal of Texas politicians.
Adhering to that adage eventually becomes something masochistic and Sisyphean.
Apply it to your personal relationships, but you will be steamrolled over and over again if you naively assume good faith in politics, business, etc even after you've been flattened to a pancake.
as I've said before, if you block legal porn sites, people will find other ways of getting porn which will expose them to and prolierate illegal porn. This is not a good law.
I'm more interested in the downsides of not having ID verification. We have an entire generation of humans raised with effectively no verification going back 30 years now. So what is the data? Why is a high barrier so important that every adult has to annoyingly climb over it with all sorts of friction?
I think having to codify "obscenity" so deep into the law to even make it become an exception to free speech is an indicator of a bigger problem. I know the US is generally a lot more conservative about this, but it really feels like more extreme forms of religion/politics are relying on the popular vote to shortcut solutions.
No child was ever damaged from getting a glimpse of a very normal adult human interaction. When young people are old enough to be curious about this (e.g. they're looking to access spicy content), the correct approach IMO would be an open dialogue from their parents and extensive education/access to age-adapted materials in school. There is nothing dirty, shameful or obscene about sex, it's a natural process. It's also not scary, and it can be practiced safely and responsibly.
One consequence that concerns me greatly is that men in the generation you're describing routinely choke their sexual partners. I remember a decade or two ago, when I thought it was ridiculous that porn might teach people to be abusive - I regret to admit that I was catastrophically wrong. (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/sep/02...)
I don't follow the argument. In the sphere of gender roles, for example, I absolutely believe that adults should be allowed to set up whatever arrangements are best for them. I would never walk up to a traditionalist couple and demand that they set up their relationship how I'd prefer. But I would still find it very concerning to hear that most young men expect their wives to not work or not make male friends, even if young women accepted it.
You're replying to someone who conflates this type of practice with abuse. They are not educated, not curious, and you are not going to have a productive conversation with them.
Somehow you have to provide an ID to watch porn in Texas, but a 10 year old kid can go to specs.com and just lie about their age and view imagery of a controlled substance. My wine club just delivers wine without verifying my ID, so a 10 year old child could just do the same with a parent's credit card.
Read the article, it outlines European countries that already implemented something similar.
Edit: if you don’t agree, at least comment why I’m wrong AND downvote.
> In April, chat app Discord announced it is testing face scans in the UK and Australia. Regulators in Germany have been pursuing age checks—going as far as to fine individuals posting on X (then Twitter) in 2023—for years. Last week, Pornhub returned to France—it pulled services relating to the country’s age checking at the start of June—after a court ruling limited the law. And by July this year, porn sites and social media platforms operating in the UK are required to introduce “robust” age checks. Pornhub owner Aylo announced on Thursday that it would adopt "government approved age assurance methods” to comply with the law.
The movie theater doesn't keep a database of who's been watching their movies.
[edit] and that doesn't just mean “okay jimbob is a dirty dirty boy.” It’s also a handy way to create a registry of whatever the handlers think is the target perversion du jour.
[edit][edit] … and it's not even the government who's keeping that database, it's pornographers. Regardless of your political leanings or trust in the gov't, can you imagine a less trustworthy party to hand off your ID to? mein gott
Are there business destroying fines associated with non compliance? Otherwise it becomes a, “Whoopsie fine” when companies inevitably get caught selling out its user base.
I understand the sentiment and agree but the practicality is a different story.
Not many people pay in cash (though, for now, it's still possible). 99.9% of people carry a tracking device in their pocket, and it's a junior engineer level task to correlate transaction data to an ID via any number of methods.
So while it's not "built in" at a movie theater it's child's play to figure out who's watching what, when. Effectively, it's the same thing as requiring an ID to watch porn in that light. Similarly Google has shown (repeatedly) it's absolutely trivial to figure out who a person is via tracking. Then, it's absolutely trivial to determine a person and their porn preferences.
I can see both sides. The parents are ultimately responsible for their child's media consumption. But, a company also has a duty to ensure they're not violating any rules. The "Are you over 18" pop ups are there for legal reasons. I think that this ruling simply codifies what has already existed and provides a way to make it harder to bypass (without a VPN).
Surveillance capitalism wasn't innovated when movie theaters started checking IDs.
But since they've moved most ticket purchases online it's very likely they do maintain such a database now, and monetize an "anonymized" version of the data.
ID to see rated-R movies in theaters (but not on streaming services, some of which don't even require payment or even an account), is a voluntary measure done by the industry.
I don't know that I've ever actually been carded at a theater.
> You already have to show ID to see rated-R movies in the US.
The law doesn't, in most places, require theaters to demand or log ID (it sometimes requires them to deny admission to people under 18 without parent or guardian permission, and in some places doesn't even do that, with any restrictive policy being a matter of theater policy following private industry group recommendations), and they mostly don't even do the former unless the patron appears, to the ticket seller, to be underage (and even then, IME, its iffy, probably because while that's generally theater policy, the ticket sellers aren't minimum wage earners, likely teens themselves, and not closely supervised.)
Putting aside the actual differences between that and this, I guess I don't think that should be required by the state either.
If an individual theater wants to do it, sure, but I don't agree with the state requiring it.
There's something sort of hypocritical about wanting to give parents more control over decisions about their children while simultaneously taking it away.
If I have a mature child who wants to see an acclaimed art film that is R rated for whatever reason, why shouldn't I be able to make that decision? What's the next step? Verification on blu-ray players?
Hey— performer & small site owner here. Most of the hypothetical cases in the media (and these comments) relate to Pornhub, OF, etc— companies that definitely can afford to implement age verification even if it hurts their bottom line. This totally misses the vast majority of porn sites that are very small, operate on licensed technology that may not even be maintained, and would have their ~low-5-digit annual income nuked by the cost of compliance. In these cases, geo-blocking states one by one as they implement these laws becomes the only option. Yeah VPNs exist, but HN users faaaaar over-estimate the technical knowledge & ability of the average American used to having the net served to them on a silver platter.
> Yeah VPNs exist, but HN users faaaaar over-estimate the technical knowledge & ability of the average American used to having the net served to them on a silver platter.
We can evaluate this by considering the results of DNS blocking ThePirateBay.
ref: https://kagi.com/search?q=How+effective+was+dns+blocking+the...
Most of the time they'll go on Twitter or the noncompliant websites instead. That being said, published numbers have shown VPN subscriptions skyrocket. Public tech skills aren't what they were in the 2000s, but people who can't/won't verify ID are motivated. It is a powerful force after all.
Just make sure it is not a Facebook owned VPN which is actually used to spy on its users.
https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/facebooks...
I hope you’re right! There’s certainly nothing inherent stopping a widespread shift toward VPN usage and other technical work-arounds that have been part and parcel of internet usage in many countries for decades.
The regulatory burdens on most companies have been gradually increasing, to the point that it is very difficult to run companies with <100 (some might say <1000) employees in most non-software industries. I am sorry to hear that it will negatively impact you, but you don't have the most sympathetic story, and nobody seems to care about this issue anyway, so there's little hope of reprieve, and you'll likely just have to bear it or quit.
Why is the story not sympathetic?
As a performer and small site owner, am I to understand that you usually sell sexual material and you don't perform any check to make sure that they are not kids? How are you making sure that users are of age other than the "I am 18: ENTER" button? Maybe you take credit cards and can check their age through that? Do you take crypto or wallets that don't require 18+?
Do CC issuers report the owner's age?
I am not sure whether the issuers report that to the processors (though I doubt it), but you cannot get that information from a processor.
I have kids and try very hard to keep them from inappropriate material online.
The real dangers aren’t dedicated porn sites, but poorly managed social media sites. You can’t just block the domain.
In many cases, the bad material comes from peers. Kids have always talked about “bad” things, but the internet super charges it.
I generally support these efforts, but I’m also very cynical they help.
Politicians focus on the problems they control, like rules for sites that rigorously follow the laws and fit in a clear category. They care far less about the grey areas where the most harm is often done.
I think this is a good thing. I’d feel a lot better if these efforts were combined with rigorous privacy protections.
For example, third party identity verification services should be civilly liable for privacy breeches, and required to carry insurance to meet the obligations.
I tend to think that this challenge posed by "mixed" domains, partly unobjectionable but partly inappropriate, will only become more prevalent. A couple of thoughts:
1. Filtering at the DNS level will never be enough. You'll always need to have the capability for the browser or user agent to do filtering, since the user agent has the context to know the full URI as well as other things needed for filtering. The OS admin (parent, school IT admin etc) will need to be able to block all user agents except the ones that have the reporting and filtering capabilities tuned to the admin's requirements. This is the direction Windows is heading, but it is very rough.
2. I wonder if more domains could do what Google, Bing, Youtube etc do and permit a safe version to be requested at the DNS level. I personally would like to be able to do so with Reddit, Twitter and more.
The absolute worst domain for mixed content is google.com. Google has it's own internal internet. Searching for inappropriate images on Google images (using "safe" terms), and downloading the cached image is a powerful workaround.
Ok, there are a few worse ones. But it's pretty bad.
I’m curious if Apple Wallet will provide a framework for future privacy protecting age verification nationwide after securing the ability to load US Passports into Apple Wallet, since Driver’s licenses in Apple Wallet is such a patchwork and they seem to be a trusted method of doing verification without submitting your information to some sketchy porn website.
Would it not be reasonable and safe and private to implement age verification through login.gov? An Oauth implementation that knows your identity and age can produce a verifiable token that attests your age but not identity. The only way your identity would leak would be if both the porn site and the oauth retain the tokens (which they would both claim not to do else no one would use this), and the attacker gets access to both.
I know it's unlikely to happen because of America's (misguided IMO) extreme distaste for digital government ID, but it seems like the current solution (people uploading pictures of their driver's license to porn websites) is worse in every possible way.
You need something like Verifiable Credentials to do this properly imo. You don't want something like OAuth because the login service knows which websites you're requesting the login from.
I'm not suggesting that people actually authenticate to Pornhub using Login.gov's oauth, they would continue to auth (or not) as they do now. Login.gov can issue a token saying, in essence, "A user authenticated to me, and that user over 21, but I'm not going to identify them, I'll just give you a random GUID so this token will be unique".
edit to add more details, since I'm thinking it through: the token would need to include the issue date and be signed obviously, and would be ephemeral. Properly implemented, it could be done entirely in the browser (Firefox would have a "age verification provider" pull-down) in way that's transparent to the user and both private and secure. And since you have to be 18 to get a credit card, essentially any service you pay for with a credit card in your own name ought to be able to attest your age, even if it hasn't done KYC or scanned a government ID.
Whatever technical solution is implemented needs to:
1. Not inform the authentication provider about which websites you're visiting.
2. Not inform the websites about your meat space identity.
Unless I'm missing something, what I'm describing satisfies both of these (unless one or both parties are malicious).
I'm a Texan and can't say I'm particularly a fan of the state politics or the current US Supreme Court, but at the same time, I can't say that this law particularly bothers me. I don't have children, and so I don't know if I can really understand what parents are dealing with in trying to ensure that their children are kept away from undesirable material, but it does seem rather difficult; I certainly don't envy them.
Its bullshit a kid can buy a vpn without an ID for 3$ and skip any restriction, and even without that 90% of international porn sites, so the law fixes nothing but opens a slippery slope, whats next a law saying US needs a "Great Firewall" to protect the children from international deviancy.
And it also just opens the possibility for centralized ID verification services being breached and tieing identities to their more personal vices, its only a matter of time till a ID services gets exploited and a bunch of peoples identities and the sites they use are exploited.
Taking a step back from this case.
In general any legal argument of the form: People will break the law, so there is no point in the law, is bullshit. Imagine any law and you will see how ridiculous it is.
"Making stealing with guns is illegal, people will use facemasks and file gun identifiers" "Adding security features to money is pointless, counterfeiters can always " "Adding locks to doors is pointless, if an thief wants to they will picklock it or copy your key" "making alcohol illegal is pointless, kids can present fake ids or ask their parents..." murder illegal is pointless
Not a good analogy because people don't inherently crave firearms as an inescapable aspect of the human condition. They do crave sex, food and, by most anthropological accounts, drugs. When we try to artificially restrict these innate desires we consistently see people reject those restrictions in large numbers, oftentimes leading them to fulfil those needs in worse ways than the ways that were limited. And only the most repressive regimes/social orders are able to (mostly) quell that perpetual rebellion, but those are not systems anyone I know would want live under.
Kids don't go through the hoops to buy and install a VPN just to access porn. If they were not exposed to it in the first place, which is very easy without a VPN, then they wont have the interest to get one.
Kids were using VPNs and proxies when I was in school in the 2000s to access Myspace, flash games and comics. There are free ones that are spyware + hijack your PC for use in a botnet.
These were "normie" kids, not future hackers.
> Kids don't go through the hoops to buy and install a VPN just to access porn.
When I hosted a Minecraft server, I routinely got DDoS'd by gradeschoolers. I have little doubt they could be tunneling thru a VPN in short order - because they did that too.
So the Texas porn law also removes hormones and curiosity? Every kid who has ever used a search engine has typed in the word fuck to see what comes back. But instead of clicking on the first link of peoplefucking.com and stopping they'll just click on peoplefucking.fr. Then there will be demands that all websites now must be approved by the government to protect the children
As someone who went through hoops to disable filtering back in the 90s when that was the solution, yes they do. VPNs are free and can be installed on a device in about 5 minutes.
kids will absolutely do that.
Many VPNs are free iOS apps that vacuum your data. They are consumer-level download-tap-tap easy.
You will need to upload your ID to post on social media. Bills like that have already been introduced. Lawmakers have already said this is their intention.
We are going to "think of the children" ourselves into needing to give every site our ID, or more, just to use the internet.
This is just the beginning.
Edit: really confused as to why this simple statement is flagged
Probably so - I've long lost the thread of what most of this is about. For instance, the state recently passed a law requiring that the ten commandments be posted in every classroom. And I had to stop and think - how many of these legislators themselves feel like they should be bound by said commandments? I'd suspect hardly any, based on their behavior.
Ofcourse it is. Reddit to start working with “various third-party services” to verify a user’s humanity - https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/06/reddit-will-tighten-verifi...
"...and if we let gay people get married soon people will be marrying their dogs!"
I do think there are legitimate reasons to not like the bill, but what you said is classic slippery slope
One difference is that there are absolutely no people involved with the current political power structure who are openly saying their end goal is to marry dogs.
"“Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
--Project 2025
That’s an insane leap of what I said. Like the opposite of what I said. Legalizing gay marriage is giving people more rights, not restricting them like what the court is doing here.
Because .... ITS A SLIPPERY SLOPE, that the republicans in charge and religious right wing have shown they are perfectly OK with pushing for, shit its funny how project 2025 is like 60% implemented and people are still acting like its all some conspiracy and this weird religious right wing shit isnt actually happening
"IT IS A SLIPPERY SLOPE! First we gave women rights, then black people rights, and now we're trying to give trans people rights and rights to illegal immigrants!"
To be clear, I support all of those things, but the point I'm making is that saying it's a slippery slope is a bad argument because A) the next steps are often based on opinion and not fact and B) what one person sees as a slippery slope another person sees as progress and growth.
I'm not arguing in favor of this Texas bill (I have pretty mixed feelings about it honestly). I'm just saying the argument the first person made is a bad argument.
We’re already sliding down the slippery slope. Claiming I’m arguing in bad faith is just helping the people that are pushing us down it. A slippery slope isn’t a bad thing if it involves people getting more rights.
I also think it’s somewhat ironic that my simple statement that started this conversation has been flagged. Free speech really is done in the US.
sometimes you can clearly see the slope being greased
Banning kids from using social media would probably have a much more significant positive impact on their mental development. Obviously kids browsing Pornhub is not a good thing, but sites like TikTok expose them to much more traumatizing violent material, and of course turns them into quick dopamine-seeking zombies that are glued to their smartphones.
Frankly speaking, even for underage teenagers the most harmful thing about porn is the potential for addiction, not the content itself.
A note on what the future will look like and how we'll get there.
ref: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/06/27/the-conservatives-on-the...So how broad is this?
Can a state now require you to verify your age and identity to read a newspaper they don't like?
Not unless that newspaper is "more than one-third sexual material".
The archive link shared by heythere22 (which seems to be a different story) discusses this.
The published plan from the heritage foundation includes a few more steps: (1) redefine obscenity to include pornography, effectively banning it via interstate commerce laws (2) extend this to anything that could “be harmful to minors”, which will certainly include information about groups they don’t like, starting with LGBTQ+.
Considering another of today's rulings came down in favor of religious opt-outs for kids in public schools, and that that case came out specifically because parents didn't want their kids exposed to books with LGBTQ characters in them, then yeah—I'd say we're scarily close to redefining an entire class of people's existence as obscene.
(Never mind the fact that other recent anti-LGBTQ rulings and policies have heavily implied as much, but I don't think they've been quite so explicit. Yet.)
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/27/nx-s1-5430355/scotus-opt-out-...
This is already laid out in Project 2025.
> Transgender people will see their existence denied and their rights stripped away under Project 2025. The authors equate ‘transgender ideology’ to pornography, calling for it to be outlawed. While the far-right policy agenda cannot directly ban transgenderism, it aims to do so indirectly by labeling it as pornography, and then outlawing pornography itself – effectively erasing transgender identity from the U.S.
https://doctorsoftheworld.org/blog/project-2025-lgbtq-rights...
So pornhub needs to see how many terabytes of content they host and use AI to generate 2x more terabytes of cat pictures and add them to a compliance tab on their home page now?
Seems annoying but not impossible to do.
Edit: I am happy to build a cat pic to porn ratio audit company if anyone is interested. I want to participate in the funniest regulatory process this will create
Contact vx underground, they'd be happy to help
doubly so because you can create the cat pictures and make them technically accessible just by hosting them but you don't have to provide equal means of access between the cat pictures and the "cat" pictures. Users are guided to the content that they're actually there for and anyone who actually wants to see feline photos can navigate to their URLs manually. Every pic uploaded triggers generating another cat pic (or subtly altering one that exists) and now no minors are protected but your operating costs have gone up by a little bit and the government has established that it gets to decide what is appropriate for minors and can use violence to force the entire internet to meet that definition.
There are quite a few legislators who'd consider an episode of Will and Grace to be entirely "sexual material" because it depicts gay main characters.
Ezekiel 23:20 isn't, though, of course.
Wanna bet what the ratio is for e.g. Reddit?
NSFW is hidden by default iirc, so something like this would only apply to enabling NSFW content.
This seems pretty easy to get around through either lorem ipsum or inflated pizza related dialogue.
So a site just needs to generate enough content until its under that threshold?
> So a site just needs to generate enough content until its under that threshold?
No. That alone is highly unlikely to prevent performative lawsuits from state attorney generals. Especially (but not limited to) AGs who are intent on satisfying their culture war kink.
Huh, I think old playboy magazines might actually be under that one third.
What counts as sexual material?
Pretty much all courts in the US would use the Miller test to determine if material is obscene or not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test
I am not a lawyer and am not behind a PC atm, but didn't Rowan v. USPS determine that the receiver of mail has sole discretion about if the material they received is pornographic or not?
A more limited context of course.
Not really.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_v._United_States_Post_Of...
> The addressee of postal mail has unreviewable discretion to decide whether to receive further material from a particular sender, and a vendor does not have a constitutional right to send unwanted material to an unreceptive addressee.
It's not necessarily that the receiver has the sole right to determine if the material is pornographic or whatever, its that the receiver of mail has the right to decide to no longer receive material and that the sender doesn't have a right to force its delivery through the mail.
The form to prevent someone from sending you mail you don't want is a PS Form 1500. This form starts off saying:
> If you are receiving unwanted sexually oriented advertisements coming through the mail to your home or business
But, you can still just file it against say a roofer sending you unwanted advertising or whatever. The USPS isn't allowed to challenge your personal determination that you're receiving unwated sexually oriented advertisements. Maybe you personally find roofers sexy and are trying to avoid being around roofers and having their services offered at your home. USPS isn't allowed to judge.
Republicans have slowly been moving toward anything LGBTQ being reclassified as "obscene" "pretty much" as defense for what courts consider shifts from day to day, as more right wing get put into positions of powers specifically RELIGIOUS right wing people, the courts have been more than willing to keep redefining what things were previously meant to mean.
Let me start off saying I'm not a fan of this law. I don't think these requirements are workable with current technology, and I don't necessarily agree with the goals or that the goals are worth the side effects of the regulations.
> Can a state now require you to verify your age and identity to read a newspaper they don't like?
Most states have laws in place that regulate the sale and distribution of pornography and other "obscene" materials. This has been true for a long, long time. So yes, states have had the ability to require you to show ID to get a "newspaper" they don't like, assuming that newspaper is actually just pornography/obscenity. I don't think most people would argue Pornhub are news sites though.
But what counts as obscene is not well defined. Forget newspapers you could have to age gate Wikipedia
I understand the point you're trying to make. However, I wanted to point out that Wikipedia being one-third porn/obscene content is unlikely in the extreme.
Not if I get to pick what's obscene
It's not really that unlikely. In the exact same brief upholding the Texas Porn ID law they're arguing that states have the power to decide what is obscene or not; they're setting up the blocks for saying things like any LGBT content is inherently obscene. This is especially clear in another ruling posted today [1] where the supreme court argues that parents have a right to fully withhold children from any LGBT content they might experience from school.
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-297_4f14.pdf
I'm just very skeptical of the argument that, when we see a fuzzy line, we have to erase it entirely so that nobody can abuse the fuzziness.
What counts as obscene has been defined for a while. And I don't think Wikipedia would count as obscene by the Miller test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test
. Whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
. Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law,
. Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
Clearly the whole of Wikipedia is not trying to appeal to purient interests of the average person. I don't think much of the content of Wikipedia is describing sexual content in a patently offensive way, and I'd argue it has serious political and scientific value.
Even in this description you deferred to your own personal interpretation when you said "I don't think much of the content of Wikipedia is describing sexual content in a patently offensive way". Someone might, or might find it politically expedient to pretend that they do. After all, what's "offensive" is arbitrary.
What counts as obscene has notably not been defined.
"Contemporary community standards" and "lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value" are so vague as to be useless. Whose community? Which standards? How many people have to be offended by something? How many people have to find value in it for it to be serious?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity
> In 1957, two associates of acclaimed poet Allen Ginsberg were arrested and jailed for selling his book "Howl and Other Poems" to undercover police officers at a beatnik bookstore in San Francisco. Eventually the California Supreme Court declared the literature to be of "redeeming social value" and therefore not classifiable as "obscene". Because the poem "Howl" contains pornographic slang and overt references to drugs and homosexuality, the poem was (and is) frequently censored and confiscated; however, it remains a landmark case.
The Simpsons was considered concerningly off-color in the 1990s; I remember quite a bit of pearl clutching about it, to the point of them getting into a bit of a feud with George and Barbara Bush. Now it's positive family values TV of "serious artistic value".
Most of what's on Pornhub is considered pornography but not obscenity currently, but that could change on a dime.
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https://archive.is/9DGKM
So, buy stock in VPNs?
Or in anti-porn and anti-vpn startups. If you suggest teenagers will buy VPNs and we should monetize that, it should set some alarms to question your ethos.
I think plenty of legal adults have zero interest in having a link tied to their porn consumption. The never ending stream of data leakage announcements should make it clear that if the data is collected, you have to assume it will become public. VPN at least puts a layer of indirection on that.
Agreed. As an adult, I would use a VPN to bypass ID requirements to preserve my privacy.
Which they're fully aware of. They will eventually at some point pass a law requiring you to identify yourself to the VPN and/or government.
This decision is ultimately about the end of the last vestiges of anonymity on the internet, unfortunately.
Next step is to outlaw VPNs
So just produce three-fourths AI-generated non-adult irrelevant material, and segregate it enough to not harm regular user activity. Got it.
This will just drive people to non-compliant foreign sites. They just killed their own adult industry, who is gonna take their business and taxes elsewhere
I think your assumption that Texas cares about its porn industries is incorrect. Pornhub is a Canadian company. Afaik it's the #1 porn site, I could be wrong. I assume if they don't comply, their DNS host will be blocked in Texas. Registries of porn sites are readily available. (I use them in my hosts file blocking). So, my guess is that the likely step will be block all of them until they prove they have ID enforcement.
> I assume if they don't comply, their DNS host will be blocked in Texas.
I'm guessing you mean blocking their entire NS host. It would be a massive overreach and would block every site they're authoritative for.
It's one more thing on the rapidly growing Unconstitutional=Okay stack. Cherry-picked courts are routinely fine with that. But it wouldn't stop lawsuits from registrars, site owners and other parties harmed thru collateral damage.
Just blocking PH's current IP would take down over 40 sites.
ref: https://bgp.he.net/ip/66.254.114.41#_dnsrecords
Conservatives claim to hate Chinese-style internet censorship, but in practice they want to build a Great Firewall of Texas.
> Conservatives claim to hate Chinese-style internet censorship
What they hate about Chinese internet censorship isn't the scope and pervasiveness, it’s who specifically controls it and what specific decisions are made.
I think all 3 of these things are valid concerns.
You do, but lawmakers generally don't.
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I don't think the big-business adult industries is particularly present in Texas, and the independent creators who are in Texas leaving if they are able or being forced out of work if not is probably an active goal of Texas politicians.
> They just killed their own adult industry, who is gonna take their business and taxes elsewhere
Excellent.
Someone in this chain of corruption probably owns a VPN company or another entity benefitting (short term) from this ban.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
You have to adjust your priors at some point though, right?
Adhering to that adage eventually becomes something masochistic and Sisyphean.
Apply it to your personal relationships, but you will be steamrolled over and over again if you naively assume good faith in politics, business, etc even after you've been flattened to a pancake.
Not the first time porn has come up on here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30441276
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25418862
as I've said before, if you block legal porn sites, people will find other ways of getting porn which will expose them to and prolierate illegal porn. This is not a good law.
I'm more interested in the downsides of not having ID verification. We have an entire generation of humans raised with effectively no verification going back 30 years now. So what is the data? Why is a high barrier so important that every adult has to annoyingly climb over it with all sorts of friction?
I think having to codify "obscenity" so deep into the law to even make it become an exception to free speech is an indicator of a bigger problem. I know the US is generally a lot more conservative about this, but it really feels like more extreme forms of religion/politics are relying on the popular vote to shortcut solutions.
No child was ever damaged from getting a glimpse of a very normal adult human interaction. When young people are old enough to be curious about this (e.g. they're looking to access spicy content), the correct approach IMO would be an open dialogue from their parents and extensive education/access to age-adapted materials in school. There is nothing dirty, shameful or obscene about sex, it's a natural process. It's also not scary, and it can be practiced safely and responsibly.
One consequence that concerns me greatly is that men in the generation you're describing routinely choke their sexual partners. I remember a decade or two ago, when I thought it was ridiculous that porn might teach people to be abusive - I regret to admit that I was catastrophically wrong. (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/sep/02...)
I don't particularly enjoy it, nor does the wife.
But if erotic choking is consensual amongst two adults, what exactly is the issue?
Are we to start policing how people enjoy fucking?
I don't follow the argument. In the sphere of gender roles, for example, I absolutely believe that adults should be allowed to set up whatever arrangements are best for them. I would never walk up to a traditionalist couple and demand that they set up their relationship how I'd prefer. But I would still find it very concerning to hear that most young men expect their wives to not work or not make male friends, even if young women accepted it.
You're replying to someone who conflates this type of practice with abuse. They are not educated, not curious, and you are not going to have a productive conversation with them.
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Dramatically lower teen pregnancy rates is one metric from the last 30 years.
Somehow you have to provide an ID to watch porn in Texas, but a 10 year old kid can go to specs.com and just lie about their age and view imagery of a controlled substance. My wine club just delivers wine without verifying my ID, so a 10 year old child could just do the same with a parent's credit card.
I don't understand how this makes sense.
[dead]
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> the European playbook
Reference?
Read the article, it outlines European countries that already implemented something similar.
Edit: if you don’t agree, at least comment why I’m wrong AND downvote.
> In April, chat app Discord announced it is testing face scans in the UK and Australia. Regulators in Germany have been pursuing age checks—going as far as to fine individuals posting on X (then Twitter) in 2023—for years. Last week, Pornhub returned to France—it pulled services relating to the country’s age checking at the start of June—after a court ruling limited the law. And by July this year, porn sites and social media platforms operating in the UK are required to introduce “robust” age checks. Pornhub owner Aylo announced on Thursday that it would adopt "government approved age assurance methods” to comply with the law.
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You already have to show ID to see rated-R movies in the US. I don't see how this is any different.
The movie theater doesn't keep a database of who's been watching their movies.
[edit] and that doesn't just mean “okay jimbob is a dirty dirty boy.” It’s also a handy way to create a registry of whatever the handlers think is the target perversion du jour.
[edit][edit] … and it's not even the government who's keeping that database, it's pornographers. Regardless of your political leanings or trust in the gov't, can you imagine a less trustworthy party to hand off your ID to? mein gott
By the letter of the Texas law, neither do the commercial entities that have to verify identity:
https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/88R/billtext/pdf/HB01181F....
Edit: Key bit there, the commercial entity or third party verification “may not retain any identifying information of the individual”.
Are there business destroying fines associated with non compliance? Otherwise it becomes a, “Whoopsie fine” when companies inevitably get caught selling out its user base.
well I’m definitely sure there’s no bad actors or just plain incompetent folks who can fck that up nossir
I understand the sentiment and agree but the practicality is a different story.
Not many people pay in cash (though, for now, it's still possible). 99.9% of people carry a tracking device in their pocket, and it's a junior engineer level task to correlate transaction data to an ID via any number of methods.
So while it's not "built in" at a movie theater it's child's play to figure out who's watching what, when. Effectively, it's the same thing as requiring an ID to watch porn in that light. Similarly Google has shown (repeatedly) it's absolutely trivial to figure out who a person is via tracking. Then, it's absolutely trivial to determine a person and their porn preferences.
I can see both sides. The parents are ultimately responsible for their child's media consumption. But, a company also has a duty to ensure they're not violating any rules. The "Are you over 18" pop ups are there for legal reasons. I think that this ruling simply codifies what has already existed and provides a way to make it harder to bypass (without a VPN).
Why don’t they?
Surveillance capitalism wasn't innovated when movie theaters started checking IDs.
But since they've moved most ticket purchases online it's very likely they do maintain such a database now, and monetize an "anonymized" version of the data.
ID to see rated-R movies in theaters (but not on streaming services, some of which don't even require payment or even an account), is a voluntary measure done by the industry.
I don't know that I've ever actually been carded at a theater.
> You already have to show ID to see rated-R movies in the US.
The law doesn't, in most places, require theaters to demand or log ID (it sometimes requires them to deny admission to people under 18 without parent or guardian permission, and in some places doesn't even do that, with any restrictive policy being a matter of theater policy following private industry group recommendations), and they mostly don't even do the former unless the patron appears, to the ticket seller, to be underage (and even then, IME, its iffy, probably because while that's generally theater policy, the ticket sellers aren't minimum wage earners, likely teens themselves, and not closely supervised.)
* It's online
* It crosses state boundaries
* It's not law to show ID to get into R rated movies
Should state online privacy laws not apply to internet companies operating out of state?
I've never shown ID to see an R rated movie in a theater in the US.
Putting aside the actual differences between that and this, I guess I don't think that should be required by the state either.
If an individual theater wants to do it, sure, but I don't agree with the state requiring it.
There's something sort of hypocritical about wanting to give parents more control over decisions about their children while simultaneously taking it away.
If I have a mature child who wants to see an acclaimed art film that is R rated for whatever reason, why shouldn't I be able to make that decision? What's the next step? Verification on blu-ray players?