Unsurprisingly, Pornhub Blocks Arkansas IP Addresses
from the don't-blame-us-for-ruining-Gov-Huckabee’s-husband’s-morning-wood dept
It has been a busy day for Arkansas.
Pornhub.com geo-blocked IP addresses in Arkansas in the latest protest against unworkable age verification laws. Arkansas is the fifth state to have an age-gating statute enter force and is the fourth to be geo-blocked by the parent company of Pornhub, the Montréal-based firm MindGeek owned by Ethical Capital Partners in Ottawa. With a population of about 3 million people, the block on Arkansas adds to the growing number of blocked people in the United States — Earth’s largest consumer base for legal and consensual pornography. And, as we are seeing across the board, people aren’t happy with the block and it isn’t like these laws are going to stop people from watching porn. VPNs are gaining popularity, and not all porn sites are following these laws.
But, who is to blame for the Pornhub geo-block? Pornhub or Ethical Capital Partners? The state? It’s basic economics, folks. Generally speaking, reasonable regulations often make sense for various industries. Without government regulation, we too frequently end up with early Industrial Revolution-style labor quagmires: people get exploited, customers are at the whim of unaccountable executives, and a market ends up monopolizing. But those are general regulations that apply across the board to protect labor and customers.
There is a huge difference when regulations prevent entry or exit from a market for a variety of reasons, or when they target specific types of companies. The age verification laws in these states are textbook cases of misinformed regulation. In my time reporting on the porn industry, I have seen time and again do-gooder politicians who claim to have a moral imperative to “protect the kids.” Protecting the kids, in the eyes of such politicians, means restricting access to adult content and openly censoring otherwise First Amendment-protected forms of free speech and expression.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed into law Senate Bill 66 requiring a government identification or a personal identification document to verify one’s age in order to wank. The state legislature, which is dominated by a Republican supermajority, claimed that the bill was a “bipartisan” show of concern for minors. Truthfully, this “bipartisanship” is exclusively based on a political necessity for Democrats in the minority to effect any sort of legislative change that is not blocked by the Q-anon laced policies of Gov. Sanders and her cronies in the state legislature.
It’s clear that Pornhub shouldn’t be blamed for this new development in the ongoing drama related to age verification in the United States. In a blog post, Pornhub said the reason they’re blocking entire states is the way these “new laws are executed by lawmakers is ineffective and puts users’ privacy at risk.” That’s absolutely true. The majority of these laws don’t consider the impact of potential data bloat, security risks, and other fucked-up ideas.
Also, the enforcement of these laws isn’t consistent or uniform. Given the nature of the federal system, there are clear shortcomings in the ability of U.S. states to effectively enforce these laws in an equitable manner. But what age verification laws try to do is regulate interstate commerce while lacking the constitutional prerogative to do so. Only Congress and the federal government through an act of Congress can regulate interstate commerce in ways that are presented in these age verification bills — age estimation tech, AI-assisted biometrics, and simple interventions such as requesting sensitive personally identifiable information over openly available, non-sensitive personally identifiable information that can be found via social media.
As I’ve written for Techdirt before, Pornhub and its ownership group are on record advocating for device-based age verification solutions that try to retain as little data as possible. They say so in the blog post, and a partner for Ethical Capital Partners told me the same thing several times in calls and texts throughout my reportage on the age verification push in Utah. This is additionally the case for a variety of other sites that want to comply with the law and be viewed as ethical, transparent, and responsible. But, there is no simple solution for ensuring trust and safety policies are effective on porn sites or social media platforms that permit uncensored nudity, like Reddit or OnlyFans.
Age verification laws are currently being challenged in federal district courts across the country as violations of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The Free Speech Coalition, a trade group representing the adult entertainment industry, headlines plaintiff classes pressing courts in Utah and Louisiana to issue permanent injunctions against the implementation and enforcement of age verification laws. In Arkansas, NetChoice filed a lawsuit against the state government asking a federal judge to block the Social Media Safety Act, an age verification measure requiring a user or a parent to submit identification material in order to create new accounts. Collectively, these proposals are simply unworkable ideological statements that have little chance of surviving judicial review. Plus, it goes to show how backward conservative politicians can be on free speech topics.
The age verification law enters into force tomorrow, August 1.
Michael McGrady is the contributing editor of AVN.com.
Disclosure: The author is a member of the Free Speech Coalition. He wasn’t compensated by the coalition or its members to write this column.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, adult content, age verification, arkansas, geoblocking, porn, porn license, pornhub, sarah huckabee sanders
Companies: ethical capital partners, mindgeek, pornhub
Comments on “Unsurprisingly, Pornhub Blocks Arkansas IP Addresses”
Arkansas: “We don’t want pornhub!”
Pornhub: “M’kay” proceeds to geoblock the region.
Arkansas: cheers😃
Arkansas: realizes that incestious porn is blocked as well 😀
Re: X marks the spot
Arkansas: “We don’t want pornhub!”
Pornhub: “M’kay” proceeds to geoblock the region.
Arkansas: OK, I will just go on Twitter
Arkansas: realizes that Twitter is now X and X means all the porn and all the incest porn I want
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Stunning. Another post at TD condemning efforts to protect children. The author literally mocks the concept of child safeguarding. Pure evil.
Re:
Would you prefer they mock authoritarian shitbags like you?
Oh, wait, they already do.
Re:
Another person who will cheer on ‘protect the children’ and then complain that the Internet is only of interest to children when it becomes child safe.
Re:
…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
Re:
Quick question for you: Would you support a law that prohibited kids from accessing or reading the bible and punished platforms, businesses, groups or individuals who owned the book and had it available in a fashion that kids could access it?
If someone’s kids are watching porn then either their parents are fine with it or their parents are terrible at their jobs, in neither case is it the platform’s fault or their responsibility.
Re: Silly person
It’s not the Internet’s job to raise your bastard anymore than it’s my job if you live next door to raise it. Though they doubtless would be happier and better educated if I took them away from you.
Re:
In Arkansas you would have to identify yourself before accessing a forum like TD. I suspect if that was the case we wouldn’t hear even the tiniest peep from you.
Re: Re:
On the internet, you identify a website.
In Arkansas, the website identifies you.
Re:
Hey Jhon you manage not to molest any kids since the last time you made an accusation that was actually confession?
Re:
Hello again.
Since you were apparently OK with selling land to China and giving me boatloads of cash, let’s keep going! The next law protecting kids will also require you (as in, you specifically, not the submitter) to get 10 lashes in public for every age verification document submitted.
It’s all about protecting the kids, so I’m sure you’ll support this law too. Who knows though, you might actually enjoy this one.
Really, this post doesn’t oppose protecting kids. It opposes performative grandstanding that won’t actually protect anyone.
Re:
The author literally mocks the concept of child safeguarding.
How about parents protect their own fucking children that they chose to have? Are you a member of the same group of people who empty their bowels and yell “but muh freedums!” every time you can’t post your white supremacist Nazi bullshit on social media?
If you’re going to be an obtuse, hypocritical piece of shit, at least try to do a better job at it.
Re:
“The author literally mocks the concept of child safeguarding.”
To see what real child safeguarding is like, one only needs to have a look at the recent efforts to get children to clean meat packing plants, many in Arkansas. As if that were not enough, now Wisconsin wants to have children serving as bartenders. No body wants to parent anymore.
Re: who do you want teaching your kids?
Why arnt you at HOME, teaching your kids, monitoring them and SHOWING them how to live and deal with life and friends??
FREEDOM doent NOT Equal SAFETY. You can Pay the STATE for that, IF you want.
but IF’ you really love the idea that YOU WORK HARD AND THE EDUCATION IS TAKEN OVER BY THE GOV… We have a 16 hour 6 days per week job for you.
Just follow the bouncing BALL..
LET THEM, mess things up, and NOT tell you that YOU are responsible for OUR Government. YOU ELECTED those 500 idiots into office called congress.
“signed into law Senate Bill 66 requiring a government identification”
the real reason
barcode tattoo is next?
Re: Part of that,
seems to be that the CORPS, have lost control of THEIR data.
For some odd reasoning, you think they would protect this stuff. But look back at all the Internet and server Break-in’s. Lots of medical clinics are on that list.
All our data is in the wild. So the corps, by their own creation or Not, will force MORE identification and Facial ID and anything they want.
And with the current Gov. and the repub controls leaning to Corporations.
What the hell do you think is going to happen.
Its a trick to man kind, if you do things Slowly, they will complain when things get worse. You Backup about 1/2 way, and Slowly do the SAME THING, and we dont fight it so much…OVer and over, until we THINK its NORMAL.
Cause we EXPECT the Gov. to FIX things.
'If you don't like us blue-balling you here's the offices to start calling...'
Explaining their actions in a blog post is a good start but if they really want to hammer the point home they need to have the redirected landing page for anyone geo-blocked be one that explains why they instituted the block and more importantly provide links and other resources for users who want to do something about it.
Re:
well, it’s still a step up from black-balling.
PornHub needs to emphasize that their objection isn’t to verifying visitor’s ages. They’re OK with that. It’s that this law requires them to collect a bunch of sensitive information that could be very damaging to the visitors if it were ever made public (eg. driver’s license numbers and such that can be used for identity theft) and retain that information, providing it upon request to anybody claiming to be with law enforcement or a government agency and hoping that the security on the databases is good enough that nobody cracks them and copies it out (see list of major data compromises so far this year alone). That is the major problem with these laws. If the laws provided a way for PornHub to do the verification for a user and then only retain the results of that verification, without having to store any of the information used for it, then it would probably be workable. But that’s very deliberately not what these laws do.
Re:
Pornhub, or rather, the porn “industry” (really just a monopoly) would also like to remind you that they’ve already tried age verification in the 90s and…
it didn’t work.
Age verification at the ddor of a club etc. is effective and needs no records to be kept. Age verification at logon is ineffective as unless coupled to continuous video monitoring, as all it proves is that the person doing the logon produces a proof of age for a person old enough to use the site. Note that does not ensure that the person logging in is the person referred to in the proof of age, or that they do not hand over the use of the computer to an underage person after logon.
I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if a million Arkansas voices cried out in horror…
Just once.
Just once I’d love to see a company based in the Great White North retort: “Fuck you, we’re Canadian, so go fuck yourselves.” Coming from any company in generally, that’d be appropriate. Coming from a pornsite-owning company, that’d be both appropriate and priceless.
Re:
Unfortunately while the company may be based in Canada, the servers it needs and the companies that run them (eg. Cloudflare for the CDN) are based in the US and can’t ignore a court order to shut down the Canadian company’s servers. Nor would they even if they legally could, too much of their business depends on being on speaking terms with US authorities. Ceasing to serve customers in jurisdictions where the rules are untenable is the only thing the Canadian company can do, and even that isn’t a guarantee because VPNs are a thing and if someone visits the site using a VPN to disguise where they’re coming from the authorities can still claim jurisdiction (it’s whether the user is in Arkansas that matters, not whether PornHub knows they’re in Arkansas).
Re:
I wish this all the damn time, but sadly it’s somehow against our nature to do that very often, both our companies to Americans (our biggest trading partner/market aka our big bully brother), and our citizens towards the government.
although to be clear, the government does that to us, the citizens, constantly, because they know Canadians are super spread out across the country and also lazy AF and won’t do anything real about it, even when it’s egregious…
We’re used to the abuse being a one way street I guess? ☕¯_ (ツ)_/¯🇨🇦
so pornhub is just like “please don’t do this stupid thing Utah & Arkansas” and then when asking nicely didn’t work, they just say “well I guess we tried” and that’s how you get this outcome, it’s honestly so canadian it’s painful
Nobody here is opposed to protecting children. But this law doesn’t actually protect them any more than pre-existing laws do, while simultaneously greatly endangering adult customers.
If the laws worked well and did exactly (and only) what they purport to, everyone here would be cheering. But the law won’t do what it purports to, and it so greatly increases the risk of identity theft that no sane person would ever want such a law.
Being in favor of this particular law just proves that those who voted for it and the governor who signed it are literally insane, or so ignorant of what they are actually doing that they have no business being in elected office – there is no third possibility.
Re: 'Exploiting children for personal gain?! That's our job!'
Being in favor of this particular law just proves that those who voted for it and the governor who signed it are literally insane, or so ignorant of what they are actually doing that they have no business being in elected office – there is no third possibility.
Horrifyingly there is a third option and it’s one I’m sadly of the opinion is the most likely explanation: A majority of those pushing for laws like this do not care about protecting kids but they are all too aware that claiming that they are is not only good PR but allows them to sneak through laws that would otherwise be challenged before being passed where someone has to take it to court.
Those laws are effective
Those laws do exactly what they are intended to do whether they are struck down or not.
It’s all pantomime buffoonery for the appreciation of their base, and it actually gets them what they really want – votes.
Pornhub are such hypocrites.
They were literally willing to jump into bed with the British government about pushing their own age verification system.
Re:
It’s not hypocritical to say “We are OK with an age verification system, just not this age verification system.”
Hypocritical would be if Pornhub tried to say that a different porn site needed age verification but they didn’t.
I have a question. And a potential answer.
Exactly what harm does a child suffer upon seeing something they don’t understand for the first time. Or, as is probably more often the case, they see something that has been described in some format, and now they’re getting a virtual confirmation of that description. Exactly where is the harm?
And for the older “kids”, they’ve already seen it, already done it, and are quite often bragging about it. For them, the horse has not only left the barn, it’s done run away to the next county…. the door no longer needs to be closed.
My theory? Far too damned many “adults” are too edgy about sex as a hobby activity. For whatever reason, it’s not the content, it’s the questions that will now flow from the kid’s mouth, until either he/she gets an acceptable (and hopefully truthful) answer, or the parent beats the kid into submission, forever after ruining that child’s chances of growing up to be a decent human being. And by that I mean, thus forcing the cycle to repeat itself, yet again.
Ancillary question: We require a marriage license, why in God’s name do we not require a parenting license??
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Because marriage is assumed to lead to kids, so is a license for both.
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I remember being shocked the very first time I ran into adult content online at around 13 or 14, but I grew up fine (and realized I like women along the way). Leaving decisions regarding how kids access the internet should be left to parents honestly, it’s so subjective. That answer doesn’t make religious people who want absolute control over other people’s kids very happy, though.
Re: you are looking at
A society, that the Loudest mouth is the smallest group.
And they know Lots of tricks.
#1, FEW ever read the bill/law/regulation.
There are old ideas started awhile back, that Just dont make much sense.
You cant have sex before 18. The human body isnt designed that way.
You cant have sex until you get married.
Ewww thats Icky attitudes towards YOUR OWN BODY. You dont want the history on this, ITS SAD what MEN have had women do. Vinegar anyone? For that FRESH SENT AND FEEL.
There is to much to say about this BS. Including Legal prostitution, and Abortion. And its buried in there ALSO.
NO ONE wants others to teach them sex ed, but they WONT do it themselves, in Most cases or will do it AFTER the fact, and the kids are doing something Wrong(in some way).
Pornhub, is the Cleanest site on the net. trying to Follow all the rules from around the world, is not easy. There used to be Many sites that would scare you pretty well. Even now there are Sites for Cravings that Most may not have.(and most are monitored HEAVILY)
I think the REAL problem, in all of this, is FREE PORN.
You dont have to sign up.
IF as to look at porn you HAVE to SIGN UP. Think of the privacy issue. Think of how many Politicians that Could be Taken advantage of. And thats what they WANT.
Re:
Ancillary question: We require a marriage license, why in God’s name do we not require a parenting license??
How about having all those who enter politics get licensed as a professional to be renewed on a regular basis?
This way we would force two things.
Make intelligence a job requirement.
Have them loose their license when they try and issue legislation that goes against the constitution even if they pass the competency tests.
Yeah, this should include judges of all stripes. There is just so much stupidity and malfeasance in elected officials these days.
Re: Re: WOW
What would be on the politics test??
There really isnt much there.
And until the Lawyers really took it over, it was fairly balanced. Generally farmers with Off time after harvest and planting.
Lets evaluate the job before we decide WHO/WHAT should have the job. LEts look at how many Letters they get from constituents. and how many they listen to.
A plus?
One good thing could come from this. If these laws continue to push through and aren’t challenged fast enough, it could be cause for a federal rollout of RealID. And the funding to make it free.
We need a national id free and available to everyone.
Re:
How is that going to help prevent databases full of the information on those IDs from being hacked and leaked, specifically with information about people’s porn-viewing habits attached? THINK, LODOS, THINK.
Re: Re:
Except for prudes, porn viewing data shouldn’t concern anyone.
Not that that data should be stored in relation to access. Burning cookies can verify the date line of the data code on a chip and nothing more. A cookie that expires after the page is closed. And federal criminal penalties for reading and/or storing and data other than age ends the data privacy issue.
But you miss the bigger picture. I don’t care about history data being hacked. I’m more interested in anything that would cause the rollout of a free nations ID card. One that would solidify all the various state licences and IDs into one format.
One that would prove identity, citizenship, age. A single smart chip is that you swipe or tap for air or train travel. Voting. Purchasing.
I’ve seen national IDs like this in Asia and how they work. They’re wonderful. Easy, simple.
Ideally every American citizen and legal resident should have a federal ID updated yearly from the day they are born or granted residence. Free. Consistent.
Re: Re: Re:
And yet, if you were to ask the average person about their porn viewing habits, I doubt they’d tell you the whole truth—if they tell you anything at all. The point, Trumpist, is that having your porn viewing habits attached to your government name and your address gives anyone who can connect the two an easy way to potentially embarass you…unless, of course, you’d like to maintain your privacy by paying a modest fee to the people who got their hands on that information.
Yes, yes, you’re a sociopathic nihilist Trump voter who doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself. You’ve made that abundantly clear in the past.
Re: Re: Re:2
Only myself? Bull.
Family first, then friends, then self.
Then neighbours.
Then community.
If there’s time I may consider the problems of some random stranger.
While you are busy contemplating stealing the money from people with more than you as you walk down the street ignoring the homeless,
I’m tossing whatever loose change in their box. And a pack of smoke and a beer since they’ll buy it anyway.
Oh, I grabbed a few minutes of some (lipstick) lesbian video a few days ago. And some crazy bi sex thing a few days before that. Porn tends to be boring and non-stimulating for me. To each their own.
You don’t know me. You just know what your choice of bubble-life news tells you to think about those that voted for anyone other than the bytch that ran in 2016.
You have your tiny bubble ideas of what anyone and everyone that disagrees with you is. And that’s the end
In that regard, you’re no better than the fringe right in their commy bastard thinking.
not sure if you are trying to offend me or shame me (you can’t, I stand proud that I voted against her and for a halfway decent president that tried to secure our country despite non-stop nonsense interference).
And that Mccrazy list of 60% good, 30% yawn, 10% bad, that’s my answer.
A good portion of that list has nothing to do with Trump himself. A countable amount is fictional nonsense. The vast majority intentionally is without context.
Anyone who can look at that list and come away with the belief that Trump was a bad president is so delusional it’s not worth trying to discuss anything.
Re: Re: Re:3
What does upset me: is you run around and play the moral high ground by slinging about comments that are wholly implied through your limited belief system with no comparable factual info.
The progressive blame-everyone-else society you support caused me to become cynical and disattached. In a society where trying to help a person from a burning car, trying to save a gun shot victim, trying to help someone up who has fallen, all lead to lawsuits if you fail or do it ‘not well enough’?
I’m more worried about if someone I care about is going to get shot in one of our frequent car jackings, than some random person refused some service for whatever reason. Gangs are sniping drivers on our highways. We won’t talk about the glory shootings.
When a criminal with a gun breaks into your house at 2am and can then win the value of your house for being shot by the owner, the world is upside down.
Re: Re: Re:3
Three things.
Re: Re: Re:
Meanwhile…
How the hell did a bank employee manage to STEAL MY FUCKING ID. AND THEN FUCKING IMPLICATE ME IN SOME NONSENSE SCAM.
Yes, I’m from tthose Asian countries. Our cybersecurity is that paper thin. As is our infosec.
Re: Re: Re:2
I don’t know the details of your case, and I’m sorry that happened to you. Unfortunately, identification is only as good as how often it is accepted. And how well people check them.
Now I’m specifically speaking of Malaysia, Singapore, and Philippines, where I have some experience.
But countries with biometric ID rarely have any cases of identity fraud. Unless you’re a government employee with direct access to the database, or the entire national database is replaced with a fake one, your persona is generally safe.
Re: Re:
You ask for the impossible.
While this undoubtedly sucks for people in Arkansas, it’s probably the best direction Pornhub could’ve taken in the position they were in to minimise harm. Not in the sense politicians use it, but the harm posed against the users.
A database with identifying information like an ID or driver’s license is like blood in the water for phishers. Now have that identifying information tied to something society considers to be shameful, like watching porn, and suddenly you have inadvertently created a cornucopia of potential blackmail material. That’s also not getting into the non-zero chance someone in a position would want access to that database in bad faith.
There’s also a nonzero chance that someone in a position of power would use the site with this database instated. There’s also a nonzero chance someone might want to take advantage of that; while he was a participant rather than a consumer, Zack Weiner’s case comes to mind.
Pornhub should have an.omion addressing addition to their normal address
When I had my online radio station I had an onion address on addition to the normal web address so people could easily bypass workplace filters to tune in.
I believe there is nothing long as your work is getting dinewrong with internet radio at work is getting done
You don’t even need the tor software. Just change the proxy settings to any tor entry proxy
Office dronnes who did that were not committing any crime using the onion address on Tor to tune in to my online station
Offices people loved me for it
the blocking of our entering pornhub
this age verification dwel isnjust strate up b/s… if iremember correctly, we had to give our age/ name/,address, and stte we live in… we had to prove it when we signed nup, so why are ya’ll making our life hell???
I think you fail to understand who has what rights. You have no right to access PornHub’s content. They’re a private entity, if they don’t want to associate with you they have every right to deny you access. The only “concern” about overreaching control and infringement of personal liberties here is on the part of the Arkansas state government who are trying to impose a great enough liability on sites like PornHub that they can’t afford to risk offering service to Arkansas residents. It’s the government of the State of Arkansas that needs to find that “middle ground”, not PornHub.
bot
Is it me, or does this read like an automated response (I hesitate to raise the ChatGPT flag, but it may be that or something similar) generated by a bot. With a profile name like ‘Volume ad agency’ and a supposed ‘source’ attribution to their site… my spidey sense is tingling.
Instead of implementing blanket IP address blocks, there could be alternatives such as robust age verification processes to ensure responsible access to adult websites.
Yeah we’ll just get on with that imaginary robust verification with no unintended (or “unintended”) consequences, and not storing millions of ID credentials to be abused or exfiltrated. Thank heavens we can always just nerd harder.
Yeah, that comment is most certainly some AI-generated bullshit.
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agree
yea, I agree with you I just recently write some article for my gaming blog (https://mini-militia.com) and there is no difference between ChatGPT and a human write.
It was. We’ve seen an influx of spam bots that are posting chatgpt generated content to try to be seen as real. We’ve deleted it…
Often identified with “Matthew M Bennett” above them.
Well that’s not fair at all, the chatbots were downright pleasant in comparison and they did manage to stay on topic even if their ‘comments’ were vague and didn’t really say anything.