| Title | Pornhub Pulls Out Of Florida, VPN Demand 'Surges 1150%' | |
| Date | Wednesday January 08, @09:12PM | |
| Author | hubie | |
| Topic | ||
| from the think-of-the-children dept. | ||
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Florida witnessed a massive rise in VPN demand on New Year's Day after Pornhub began prohibiting people from accessing its site from within the Sunshine State, it is claimed.
Between the clock striking midnight and 4am on January 1, the day of the Pornhub pullout, the folks at VPN-pushing vpnMentor documented a rather incredible 1150 percent spike in Floridians wanting to use a VPN to mask their public IP addresses.
January 1 marked the implementation of Florida's age-verification mandate, so perhaps all those netizens were scrambling for a VPN client and provider so that they appeared to the adult dot-com to be visiting from somewhere outside the Sunshine State, and thus evade Pornhub's blockade.
[...] Here's the back story: In March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed the Online Protection for Minors act, aka House Bill 3, into law. The legislation requires websites to verify visitors' ages, and for those hosting a "substantial portion of material harmful to minors," such as Pornhub, to block access to anyone under 18 in an effort to prevent kids and teens from peeping on any pornographic videos. Making sure children aren't looking at smut online requires identity and age verification, which Pornhub isn't willing to get into.
HB3 allows fines of up to $50,000 for websites that don't comply with the regulations.
And so in response, Pornhub's parent company Aylo decided to yank the site from Florida users as it had already done in other states with similar laws, including Kentucky, Indiana, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas, North Carolina, Montana, Mississippi, Virginia, Arkansas, and Utah.
"Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide, including Florida, have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous," Aylo told news outlets in a statement.
"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."
[...] For what it's worth, Robin Tombs, boss of Yoti, which provides age checks for blue-movie sites in the US, argued earlier this week that its age confirmation system, using facial analysis, and identity document verification is secure and safe, as you might imagine.
[...] The New Year may ring in some good news for southern states' smut surfers, however. Over the summer, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear a case challenging the legality of the Texas law, which could set a precedent for similar age-verification mandates — and, thus, Pornhub blocks.
The Texas case, Free Speech Coalition, et al v. Paxton, is set for argument on January 15. ®
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printed from SoylentNews, Pornhub Pulls Out Of Florida, VPN Demand 'Surges 1150%' on 2025-01-24 05:29:37