PHOENIX – Pornhub, one of the world’s largest adult content websites, is blocking access for users in Arizona starting this week.
The move comes as a new state law, House Bill 2112, takes effect Friday, Sept. 26. Arizona is now among two dozen states with similar age verification legislation.
What they’re saying:
Republican State Rep. Nick Kupper authored the bill, which was signed into law by Gov. Katie Hobbs.
“I have four kids. The way they grow up is very important to me,” Kupper said. “Luckily, both sides of the aisle agree that pornography is harmful to minors.”
The new law requires adult websites to verify the age of their users.
“Anyone who wants to access a website like that will have to provide some sort of age verification, whether it’s an ID or a face scan or credit card or something like that,” Kupper said. “Each porn company, each adult content company, can either choose to do a first-party solution or they can do a third-party solution.”
Kupper said he modeled the legislation after a similar law in Texas that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Companies that do not comply can face significant fines.
“If a company violates it to the point that they have no age verification in place and a child ends up accessing their site because no age verification was there, the parent or guardian can sue on behalf of the child for $250,000 plus attorneys’ fees,” Kupper said. “If, for instance, a company decides to store your data, which is in violation of the law, you could sue on your own behalf for $10,000 a day that they stored your data and attorneys’ fees as well.”
Kupper said the law prohibits companies from storing user data.
“Nothing is supposed to be stored, and additionally, that’s a catch-all, right?” he said. “So they can’t sell it, they can’t give it to the government, they can’t do any of these things. Once you’ve accessed the site, they have to delete your data.”
The other side:
Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub, provided a statement to FOX 10, saying, in full,
“To be clear, we have publicly supported age verification of users for years, but we believe that any law to this effect must preserve user safety and privacy, and must effectively protect children from accessing content intended for adults.
Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy. Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws.
This is not speculation. We have seen how this scenario plays out in the United States. In Louisiana, Pornhub was one of the few sites to comply with the new law. Since then, our traffic in Louisiana dropped approximately 80 percent. These people did not stop looking for porn. 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.
The best solution to make the internet safer, preserve user privacy, and prevent children from accessing adult content is performing age verification at the source: on the device. The technology to accomplish this exists today. What is required is the political and social will to make it happen. We are eager to be part of this solution and are happy to collaborate with government, civil society and tech partners to arrive at an effective device-based age verification solution.
In addition, many devices already offer free and easy-to-use parental control features that can prevent children from accessing adult content without risking the disclosure of sensitive user data.”
