Papers please: for millions of Americans, accessing online pornography now requires a government ID. It could have global implications for the future of the web.
“Could” is the important word here. In other contries, we long have laws making age verification mandatory. It’s just that it’s a popup asking “Are you over 18?” And you can click whatever you want. Also the companies are in different jurisdictions, don’t comply with local law while the internet spans the globe. I don’t see any substantial difference here.
The difference is, I think, just how much of the content or there is hosted in America. If they succeed in forcing local companies to follow some new draconian measure, it’ll likely have a disproportionately high effect on non-US traffic.
Sure. I think people from the US can see what our privacy regulations did to the internet. For example with the cookie consent banners. And disclosing somewhere what personal info gets shared with whom. Up until now the USA hasn’t really made an effort to regulate the tech giants. Maybe that’s going to change with certain topics like porn. It’s definitely going to have an impact on the world. I mean lots of tech companies are located in the US. Pornhub though is from Canada as far as I know. And the second biggest porn site XVideos is based in the Czech Republic. So I’m curious how US law is supposed to be enforced here.
Huh, didn’t realize that. I understand a lot of the physical servers for those kinda companies are in the upper Midwest, but I never thought about where thire HQ is at; you make some excellent points.
There is definitely a fight brewing over who has final say in regards to what happens on the Internet. Gonna be interesting seeing how this plays out.
For sure. That’s going to be interesting. I mean at first the internet was for academics, students and smart people. Then it was the wild west. Now it’s long become integral part of society and everybody is on the internet. I think as of now it’s mainly big companies who “own” the place. My issue with that is mainly that they do with our personal info as they please. And their business tactics. Like Spotify ripping off artists, YouTube not really caring about the creators and their well-being. Everything is about ads and commercialized to the extreme. And the internet wasn’t always like this. But all of that is a slightly different story.
In the end, we have to apply our laws also to the online world. We can’t have that be a separate space. But laws are for single countries and have borders. The internet doesn’t. I sometimes see people wanting to introduce borders into the internet and make it more national. I think that’d break everything. The internet is supposed to connect us. And our world is globalized.
But we’re also not making an effort in the first place. Gambling, porn and all that unwelcome stuff is just hosted abroad. Doesn’t matter if 100% of the customers are somewhere, the company is just allowed to be ran from some small island and then it’s fine. We could just ban that in my opinion. I’m not a big fan of DNS blocking or messing with internet traffic, so we’d have to come up with a good technical solution. And I think the USA, the EU and Canada would be able to agree on some consensus regarding the protection of minors and that’d spread and affect most of the world.
Or we just go for their money. You can’t circumvent and run one of the largest online platforms without money. If all American and European comanies wouldn’t be allowed to advertise there, that’d solve the issue pretty quick. And we already had that. I think Visa or some other payment provider said they’d have to cease service if they continue not doing anything against revenge porn and exploitation and copyright infringement. That lead to all major porn platforms making account verification for the actresses mandatory and removing lots of amateur stuff and pirated videos. So that definitely works.
“Could” is the important word here. In other contries, we long have laws making age verification mandatory. It’s just that it’s a popup asking “Are you over 18?” And you can click whatever you want. Also the companies are in different jurisdictions, don’t comply with local law while the internet spans the globe. I don’t see any substantial difference here.
The difference is, I think, just how much of the content or there is hosted in America. If they succeed in forcing local companies to follow some new draconian measure, it’ll likely have a disproportionately high effect on non-US traffic.
Sure. I think people from the US can see what our privacy regulations did to the internet. For example with the cookie consent banners. And disclosing somewhere what personal info gets shared with whom. Up until now the USA hasn’t really made an effort to regulate the tech giants. Maybe that’s going to change with certain topics like porn. It’s definitely going to have an impact on the world. I mean lots of tech companies are located in the US. Pornhub though is from Canada as far as I know. And the second biggest porn site XVideos is based in the Czech Republic. So I’m curious how US law is supposed to be enforced here.
Huh, didn’t realize that. I understand a lot of the physical servers for those kinda companies are in the upper Midwest, but I never thought about where thire HQ is at; you make some excellent points.
There is definitely a fight brewing over who has final say in regards to what happens on the Internet. Gonna be interesting seeing how this plays out.
For sure. That’s going to be interesting. I mean at first the internet was for academics, students and smart people. Then it was the wild west. Now it’s long become integral part of society and everybody is on the internet. I think as of now it’s mainly big companies who “own” the place. My issue with that is mainly that they do with our personal info as they please. And their business tactics. Like Spotify ripping off artists, YouTube not really caring about the creators and their well-being. Everything is about ads and commercialized to the extreme. And the internet wasn’t always like this. But all of that is a slightly different story.
In the end, we have to apply our laws also to the online world. We can’t have that be a separate space. But laws are for single countries and have borders. The internet doesn’t. I sometimes see people wanting to introduce borders into the internet and make it more national. I think that’d break everything. The internet is supposed to connect us. And our world is globalized.
But we’re also not making an effort in the first place. Gambling, porn and all that unwelcome stuff is just hosted abroad. Doesn’t matter if 100% of the customers are somewhere, the company is just allowed to be ran from some small island and then it’s fine. We could just ban that in my opinion. I’m not a big fan of DNS blocking or messing with internet traffic, so we’d have to come up with a good technical solution. And I think the USA, the EU and Canada would be able to agree on some consensus regarding the protection of minors and that’d spread and affect most of the world.
Or we just go for their money. You can’t circumvent and run one of the largest online platforms without money. If all American and European comanies wouldn’t be allowed to advertise there, that’d solve the issue pretty quick. And we already had that. I think Visa or some other payment provider said they’d have to cease service if they continue not doing anything against revenge porn and exploitation and copyright infringement. That lead to all major porn platforms making account verification for the actresses mandatory and removing lots of amateur stuff and pirated videos. So that definitely works.
In a world where Monero exists, there is no way to stop the flow of money.