[UrMomsRobotLovr]

This age verification stuff is really poorly designed by law makers. That said, the article points out the number of free VPN services with ad blockers are a problem. Couldn’t they run their own free VPN services that enables access and keeps the ads?

Seems like porn VPN would be popular.

[decimalenough]

No, because law-abiding companies can't offer tools to circumvent the law.

As the article says, all this means is that law-abiding porn sites (that, for example, respond to requests to delete CSAM and revenge porn) will go bankrupt and everybody will be driven to sketchypron.xxx instead.

[delusional]

> law-abiding porn sites will go bankrupt

How would that work? Can PornHub not exist without the "lucrative" market of children watching porn?

[Meneth]

More like, they can't exist without the lucrative market of the 90% of current customers who will refuse age verification and go elsewhere.

[delusional]

Do you seriously believe that 90% of current porn consumers would rather watch their pornography on websites where it's intermingled with child pornography and revenge porn, than verify their age?

Are you seriously arguing that 90% of porn viewers are against digital age verification, even though about 60% of the population (in my home country) approve of the use for purchasing physical goods?

In your reading of the world, there can only ever exist a deregulated market, and democracy may as well pack its bags and make room for anarchy. I don't think that's a reasonable worldview.

[rpdillon]

> Do you seriously believe that 90% of current porn consumers would rather watch their pornography on websites where it's intermingled with child pornography and revenge porn, than verify their age?

Of course! We can go back and forth about the 90%, but the immediate data available 24 hours after the UK law passed was very clear.

> Daily visits to Pornhub, the UK’s most used porn site, fell from 3.6m on 24 July, the day before age-gating was introduced, to 1.9m on 8 August, a drop of 47%.

> At the next most popular sites, XVideos and xHamster, visits fell 47% and 39% over the same period, according to the data from Similarweb, a digital market intelligence company.

> A spokesperson for Pornhub said: “As we’ve seen in many jurisdictions around the world, there is often a drop in traffic for compliant sites and an increase in traffic for non-compliant sites.”

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/aug/13/porn-site-tr...

[ipaddr]

Yes. Sending your government issued id to random porn sites is asking for your identity to be stolen. Sites filter out any child porn because those are different serious laws. I can live with revenge porn because it's really amateur porn labelled another way. Like supporting eco friendly porn where you walk to the hotel instead of drive.

Regulating markets where someone unvested group of people decide the rules on what can sell /how it can be sold /who can buy or sell is always worse than not regulating it in the first place.

[lp0_on_fire]

> I can live with revenge porn because it's really amateur porn labelled another way.

"revenge porn", by definition is non-consensual. You might as well have said "I can live with rape because it's just love labeled another way".

[delusional]

> Yes. Sending your government issued id to random porn sites is asking for your identity to be stolen.

Ah, so you don't understand what's being proposed. Let me clear that up.

The implementation proposed by the EU does not involve your government issued id, but rather an openid style handoff to a trusted government entity, where you verify your identity with your government, followed by a handback along with a proof of your age bracket. The website asking for verification only ever gets to know if you're 16+ or 18+ (or whatever other classification we can make up).

> I can live with revenge porn because it's really amateur porn labelled another way

Fuck you. Get out of here with that shit. Disgusting.

[IAmBroom]

So radar detectors for cars don't exist?

[decimalenough]

They're not sold by car companies, and they're illegal in many countries.