Even dumber, from their perspective, because there are a mountain of historical rulings that say porn is not protected by free speech. While that's been mostly ignored and all-but-overruled relatively recently (other than exposing it to minors); considering the court has been more amicable to older rulings...

> Even dumber, from their perspective, because there are a mountain of historical rulings that say porn is not protected by free speech.

There are a mountain of historical rulings saying that obscenity isn’t protected speech, but the sonewhat fuzzy legal definition if obscenity is (at least in its normal application) narrower than the commom term “pornography”. Moreover, and more specifically related, mandatory age verification laws for adult content online have been struck down twice by the US Supreme Court as First Amendment violations, first when it struck them down as part of striking down most of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (leaving Section 230 intact but pretty much nothing else from that law), and again when it struck down the Child Online Protection Act of 1998.

EDIT: Correction: COPA was struck down by a Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court declined to hear the government’s appeal, there was no Supreme Court ruling on the merits; the end result is the same, but only the CDA was actually struck down at the Supreme Court level.

Who can forget the time Ted Cruz was looking at porno in the Supreme Court basement? https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/ted-cruz-mem...

I think you have a good point but its kind of hard to watch Puritanicals destroy your legal business and do nothing. Then a bunch of other states start doing it and you have legal battles all over the place and not enough profit to weather the storm.

is their business showing porn to minors? that's their market?

Mamdatory age verification adds barriers to adult users and does not effectively prevent children from access, which is the reason that the Third Circuit, in a decision that the Supreme Court declined to hear a government appeal, struck it down as a First Amendment violation the last time the federal government tried it, after the Supreme Court had done so the prior time, and nothing substantial has changed about those facts, and the First Amendment is incorporated against the states by the Fourteenth, so there is no reason for a different result when Texas tries to do it now.

This rule affects 100% of the visitors to the site from that state, not just minors. Many adults will not want to give their ID and personal information to a site that could get hacked and then be blackmailed. If you want an internet where you need to show your ID at every door you enter, then we want drastically different things.

Is it illegal to show a fake ID to a 3rd party, non-governmental business?

It is illegal to create or possess a fake ID in my state, which can result in 6 months in prison, a fine, and suspension of your driver's license.

Its also safe to assume such ID would be directly associated with my account, which of course would also require an email address. This effectively kills anonymous viewing of adult content on the internet, while also letting companies build and sell profiles about you.

We give up so much to solve what? A problem that hasn't been quantified in either scope or harm?

>It is illegal to create or possess a fake ID in my state, which can result in 6 months in prison, a fine, and suspension of your driver's license.

ANY Fake ID or just a state/federal one?

Can you fake a, say, Hungarian Driver's License and send them that?

I guess that wouldn't be illegal. Nice catch. But I don't know if Pornhub would accept a Hungarian ID when they are doing a Texas filter block. It would just be easier to VPN at that point. I don't think citizens should have to be crafty to live their lives (especially in their own home). Also consider minors are capable of doing these very same workarounds, so once again we get security theater at the cost of great personal privacy.

I find it completely implausible that the current court will find this to be an undue burden. Sure, if they banned porn, you could probably cobble together a coalition to save it. But the court that doesn’t care about SESTA/FOSTA will not plausibly care about an ID requirement.

Minors don't have credit cards or money to spend so they're actually a liability because of high bandwidth costs, not sure how that's a market.

It’s interesting how people grow up and pretend they did not watch some sort of pornography in their teens. Most of people in their current 20s/30s, especially the ones with unrestricted internet access has been through it. There’s probably some sort of addiction problem, but I don’t think this will anyhow fix it.

It was a lot harder when it was on a scrambled TV signal and you shared a computer with everyone.

That's a general misunderstanding of the court.

PornHub has a decent shot here. Most of the laws Texas has passed around social media haven't survived court scrutiny. There is a good chance this won't either.

Agreed; the Supreme Court is heavily Conservative, but that doesn't always align 100% with what the more vocal parts of the modern Conservative movement want or believe. I don't try to predict Supreme Court rulings, who knows what they'll do -- but I would not be shocked at all to see Conservative members of the court ruling in favor of Pornhub. It would be very consistent with prior rulings.

The Conservative court is slightly weird; it's not always going to be perfectly aligned with what the party wants. Nor is it clear that the broader Republican party would be on board with these kinds of restrictions anyway even if the court was just parroting them.

It's an oversimplification and there are caveats (coughThomascough), but in general both Conservative and Liberal courts tend to overall lean more towards broad interpretations of the 1st Amendment than the average American does. It's not a safe bet that they would suddenly reverse that trend.

> I don't try to predict Supreme Court rulings, who knows what they'll do

Why wouldn't you? They all have very predictable tendencies and don't ever surprise you. There are some cases where you can predict that Roberts will vacillate, but for the most part they are extremely predictable if you follow the court with even passing interest.

> Nor is it clear that the broader Republican party would be on board with these kinds of restrictions anyway even if the court was just parroting them.

These laws poll over a majority with Democrats. They are extremely popular.

> extremely predictable if you follow the court with even passing interest.

:shrug: Sometimes I get surprised. But certainly if you are going to make a prediction, that prediction is not going to be "we'll do a 180 on our typical rulings on the 1st Amendment." That would not be extreme consistency or predictability. Most court precedent in this area is against this kind of restriction; me refusing to make a prediction is being charitable, it's leaving open the option that the justices might decide to do something weird.

If you really believe they're going to be predictable, then the situation I'm looking at is that the current Supreme Court (Conservatives included) hasn't exactly been kind to Internet regulation and has issued extremely broad rulings reinforcing the 1st Amendment. I'm not sure that not liking porn means that's going to go out the window; this is the same Supreme Court that recently ruled unanimously that Twitter wasn't liable for ISIS content on the platform -- even though I would hazard a guess that the Liberal and Conservative members of the court both don't love ISIS. There's a general trend here with how the court is approaching Internet regulation.

> These laws poll over a majority with Democrats.

I can find one source for this and it's a Conservative super pac specifically dedicated to "family values". I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm just having a hard time finding any quality polling. Regardless, it still is not clear that the overall Republican party would broadly support ID verification online if it became a hot-button issue. Lots of things poll well in abstract before they become reality.

And I can't stress this enough, the Supreme Court does not simply parrot Conservative views. The members have their own definitions of what Conservatism means and their rulings bias towards their own definitions.

Why? Roberts votes with the liberals and then the law gets upheld 5-4. Do you really think Cavanaugh is going to break off here? It's definitely not going to be Alito, Thomas, or Barrett (!).

> Do you really think Cavanaugh is going to break off here? It's definitely not going to be Alito, Thomas, or Barrett (!).

I would not be surprised to see Cavanaugh or Barrett rule in favor of Pornhub. Thomas is weird, he flip-flops a lot on these issues. I don't know how he'd rule. You might be referencing Barrett's Catholic beliefs here, but in terms of how she's actually ruled on the court and what she's written in her opinions, it would not be at all out of character for her to side with Pornhub.