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So what? You don't have a right to easy porn, so even if an ID requirement is an onerous burden, onerous burdens are fine sometimes.
In this case, the law requires age verification for a web site run by a commercial entity where one third of the content on the site is 'harmful to minors', or the Texas AG can bring 10k USD/day charges even if no minor has visited the website. There's a lot of speech you do have a right to that can fall under that bar.
Maybe it's close enough to the right policy as to be worth that burden, but it needs to at least be considered in the context of what it's actually promoting, not just what the sticker on the front says.
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I feel like these burdens should get their own category. It's not really onerous. It's actually very easy to meet the requirement to upload a picture of my driver's license. It's just stupidly dangerous for my well being.
It would be like if airport security asked you to stick your hand into a wood chipper that sporadically turns on to get your fingerprints. There is a helpful little red and green light to tell you when it's safe, but damn I'd rather not trust my fingers to this machine run by minimum wage employees. And of course if my hand gets mulched I'm allowed to sue the judgement proof employees, or the shell company wood chipper manufacturer, but not the government that put the requirement in there in the first place.
Yeah I don't disagree it sucks and is inconvenient and has risks. It's just they're allowed to make porn access inconvenient and risky.
I think if you are not allowed to ban something then you shouldn't be allowed to make access risky. All bans are is adding a risk component to a thing. You can at least pretend like onerous requirements serve a purpose. Where onerous crosses over into risky is where I'd prefer courts to draw a line and say "you are just banning the thing, so unless you are allowed to just straight up ban the thing, get rid of that requirement."
Isn't this how it is in meatspace?
Going to the shitty area of town to the adult bookstore was one of the things you could do when you turned 18.
No. There isn't a crime rate minimum for opening an adult bookstore.
Uploading your driver's license is a government-mandated risk to your privacy, while going to the bad side of town is just an unfortunate coincidence.
No. But typically they can't be near schools, parks, houses of worship, other areas frequented by children etc.
They are excluded from some areas because of the nuisance they bring.
Okay? So ban porn advertising on any site that targets children. I'm pretty sure that law isn't even necessary because websites have a lot more control over their ads than stores have over their neighborhood.
If a city council sorted their areas by crime rate and excluded adult bookstores from the bottom X%, then I'm pretty sure the (prospective) store owners would have a good case the restrictions are illegal. If the city pulled all its cops and banned private security from them, it would be a slam-dunk case.
Once your in these stores in the shitty area of town they ask to see your ID because offering pornography to minors is a crime.
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Sure, but not in this case.
The internet has always been open for all.
Porn has been around since day one.
I remember trying to go on espn the first time I went online in maybe 1996 via AOL and porn came up. No damage done.
This is, imo, just puritinism.
I get it’s not a right … but having to wait for someone to unlock the deodorant to buy it is annoying as hell.
My impression is that randomly stumbling upon porn was a lot more common in the early years of the internet than it is now. Sure, finding porn if you search for it is super easy, but it doesn't seem to be embedded in ads or links on unrelated websites like it was back then.
It is if you go off the beaten path of the internet. The difference you're recognizing is that the beaten path of the internet didn't used to be all that much of it insofar as it existed at all. But you'll still be bombarded with porn ads and porn spam if you use imageboards, pirate, etc.
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You know, I am not a puritan and don't really care if porn is available. But are we really supposed to be concerned that homeless people can't access free porn? Like their presence isn't making public libraries and coffee shops unpleasant enough as it is?
Porn, setting aside you saying both "porn" and "free porn?" No, inasmuch as that seems like the least of their problems, liberty aside. Everything that a state or municipal government may deem harmful to minors? Yes. (And California already has a law against advertising guns/shooting sports to minors.) And while it's easy to say "Well, I can't think of anything like that I want homeless people to have," it's presumptuous to think this category will remain small, with SCOTUS giving governments a favorable precedent, and presumptuous to think one knows what tools/services are best for the homeless (compare politicians who propose to "fix" the cash-based economies of the working poor). (And short-sighted to say "I don't care if homeless people suffer;" they're not going to suffer purely in ways that don't affect you, no matter how much some people hope this would be the case.)
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Yeah, the 'homeless person' concern is not the main objection, and I don't think anyone here's going to care what Texas' policies about low-cost IDs are.
That said, I think there are serious privacy and chilling effect concerns regarding this specific implementation and how it interacts with normal website management. The Texas law applies to any website run by a commercial entity (with a tiny number of exceptions), where more than 1/3rd of its content is 'harmful to minors', must do this verification or face sizable fines (up to 10k USD/day, plus 250k USD if a minor sees any banned content). Any web host operating in the United States that serves both adult and non-adult content, or even repeats content from its users, needs to do some pretty serious evaluations.
This wouldn't be too rough if the burden from age verification was tiny -- you take the precautionary principle to the max or divide the website and/or commercial entity -- but that doesn't seem to be the case. The plaintiffs here had a bit of a nut for a lawyer, but his claims that age verification could cost 40k USD for 100k users were plausible enough for a skeptical Texas court to accept it. That's steep but workable for a conventional commercial porn site; HB 1181 does not operate based on being a commercial site selling porn, but on being a commercial entity serving partially adult material. Even if he's off by a 'mere' couple orders of magnitude, there's a lot of websites and services where that's going to bring the risk-reward underwater, or outspend what sort of losses that a hobbyist is willing to lose out on.
So they have to get rid of the porn?
Whatever you think of porn on an individual level, it has ruinous effects on society. A chilling effect on porn is clearly 'good', even if a determined actor can still get it. 'Not having porn on hobbyist sites' seems well worth whatever inconvenience it causes to people with the weirdest hobbies ever.
Don't disagree but I'm curious as to how you'd make that case.
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They have to get rid of "content harmful to minors". That's theoretically less expansive in many ways, but in practice it's far broader than all but the softest-core definition of porn.
Sure, but photos of a topless woman will only ever be enforced against pornsites or LGBT stuff.
"We won't enforce the 10k USD/day, promise , unless it gets too gay" is putting a lot of trust in Ken Paxton.
EDIT: I agree that he very probably won't go after the vast majority of such websites. I also think the only thing limiting him from picking up the weakest-looking inmate and slamming them into the wall is wanting to get some as-applied challenges settled first, and the one-in-one-hundred risk of that will make a lot of changes in behavior.
Ken Paxton is not running for reelection(he wants to be a senator instead) and only targeting homosexuals and pornsites is... very like him anyways.
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This is about teenagers, not homeless people. It is, specifically, an age verification law- yes, getting around it is probably very doable for a motivated young lad, but we can reasonably assume that the people the law is explicitly targeted at are the ones most affected.
It is a privacy violation with the purpose of deterring adults pretending to be an age verification law. "Think of the children" is as usual nothing more than a cover story. As Kagan notes, if it were just an "age verification law" and the impact on adults was as minimal as possible while still achieving the goal of deterring youths then the law would survive strict scrutiny and the majority wouldn't have had to twist itself to support lower scrutiny.
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I don’t actually mean to care about the homeless here - it just seems like me putting in my Drivers License to watch a Nikki Sims pov video from 15 years ago or something more obscene and German may lead to someone revealing this to people in an attempt at something.
Replace me with ten million other people I guess.
Maybe it’s an unfounded fear but there’s tens of thousands of people right now upset that Leo went to a wedding - I don’t want to not retire in 20 years because I have a foot fetish, and on occasion watch foot fetish video, of which on occasion veer towards obscenity.
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Well, no, it hasn't.
Yeah, thieves suck.
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