Millions Of People Are Blocked By Pornhub Because Of Age Verification Laws
On January 1, 2024, the parent company of Pornhub.com geo-blocked adult users in the states of Montana and North Carolina. Aylo, the site’s corporate parent, said they did so in protest to laws these states adopted requiring adult platforms to verify their users’ ages through various age-check tools.
This isn’t the first time Aylo geo-blocked IP addresses from an entire U.S. state. Utah, Virginia, Mississippi, and Arkansas were the first states to be blocked. Despite an age verification statute, Texas isn’t geo-blocked because Aylo’s owned properties — among other adult firms — are currently locked in litigation with Attorney General Ken Paxton. Louisiana was the first state in the union to implement an age verification statute exactly one year ago, January 2023, after the legislature passed the law in 2022. 2024 will be just as aggressive, with more states proposing these bills.
About 63.8 million Americans live in jurisdictions where mandatory age-gating for pornography website access is the law. That is a little over 19 percent of the entire U.S. population. Six of the eight states — 29.61 million people — are geo-blocked by Pornhub. Louisiana isn’t geo-blocked, but the Aylo-owned sites have lost significant web traffic in that digital space since adopting an age verification tool that integrates with Louisiana’s digital wallet mobile application. 29.61 million is about 9 percent of the entire U.S. population. Nearly one in five Americans have to comply with an age verification law in order to access porn sites. Nearly one in ten Americans cannot access Pornhub, one of the world’s most popular adult entertainment platforms, without a VPN.
It’s important to note, that this has nothing to do with the fact that people can’t watch porn on a particular platform. Rather, it has everything to do with the fact that state legislatures that are predominantly controlled by authoritarian control freaks are forcing their worldview on people in violation of the First Amendment. That’s the issue here.
Despite ongoing litigation, the Free Speech Coalition, Aylo, and other parent companies of the largest pornography platforms in the world made a case that these one-sided age verification laws — referred to as “copycat” bills in the adult industry press — violate the civil liberties of adult users and companies producing or distributing consensual age-restricted materials online. In a report I produced for AVN.com, age verification is “an infringement on the First Amendment rights of adults who are consensually accessing online pornography.” When First Amendment rights for porn are stripped, First Amendment rights for everything else are stripped. Millions of people are having their rights trampled. It may seem trivial to some, but having the ability to see porn on the internet is just as important as looking up Bible verses or watching conservative TV.
Michael McGrady covers the legal and tech side of the online porn business, among other topics. He is the politics and legal contributing editor for AVN.com.