But the people who are attacking them are, much, much worse. Thanks to things like SESTA, sex workers had to go back to their pimps.
What more than removing everything of which uploader doesn't have an identification that involved parties are over 18?
But you are right, mindgeek will probably shut down at some point , leaving the space open for a new porn king, which will probably (?) be in Russia, and it will use cryptocurrency out of necessity. In that sense, i m kind of rooting for it tbh
There's a clear pattern that is becoming very visible now, where the US attacks European or Asian owned companies in the social/content media space by leveraging baseless accusations about wrongdoings or some crime committed, then disturbing the service by threatening to ban it, or withdrawing access to payment methods.
It doesn't matter what space or type of company it is. If it is large enough and owns a big piece of a lucrative market, then it will be attacked.
The goal is to put pressure and allowing US-based investment firms to acquire the company, or to make it fold so US-based competitors can absorb the market share, and thus finally owning and controlling what is typically tens of billions of market share and steering the revenue into the US.
TikTok, Pornhub/Mindgeek, Spotify, and OnlyFans are some recent examples where exactly this method is being applied.
In reality the US government and people are so anti tech they prefer to stifle silicon valley as much as possible.
They are not competent enough to really be doing what you claim.
I could certainly build the replacement product if I wanted to.
Hosting videos at scale is an easy problem these days. Pornhub solves the niche and hard problems of handling user uploads, transcoding from a variety of upload types, content recognition, validating legality, and search over poorly defined user metadata.
A new entrant could centrally generate a human millennia of videos and richly tag them by every searchable dimension.
Pornhub won't exist in ten years because the entire need for that type of software will be reduced to near zero.
A new startup with less baggage will generate images and video at scale and destroy them. No user uploads, no legal issues, no infrastructural problems of scale for transcoding and caching arbitrary uploads, doing safety checks, etc.