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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.
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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?
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.
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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