As a side note, I would love to be a fly on the wall when they try to legislate this on sites like and similar to 4chan. I suspect Tor onion sites will suddenly become very popular despite their slowness.
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202211/advocacy-groups-urge-...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/massive-pandemic...
Porn industry is not doing anything to prevent children from watching it.
If self-regulation is non-existent then the government has to step in.
I'm sick of people sucking at their responsibilities so much that they think the government doing it for them is a great option. It's lazy.
People are absolutely entitled to their own tastes, on or off camera, in a consensual setting. But I also think we can come up with better "on-ramps" to pornography and the wide variety of sex acts that exist in the world, without allowing young people to wander without warning into STEPMOM LET ME PUT IT WHERE?? DONT TELL DAD and YOUNG ANGEL TRIPLE GANGBANG and THINKING ABOUT MY CRUSH WHILE DOING FAIRLY EXTREME THINGS TO MY BUTT (a real title that I will never forget, and yes they were "extreme" even by today's standards).
Not to mention the subtle racism and often-not-subtle misogyny that still exists in traditional porn tropes, and IMO might be more harmful than actually watching porn itself.
Also the sheer amount of step-sibling porn on the free porn "tube" sites is especially weird and disconcerting, given that young people are most likely to see porn there and not on, say, an private OnlyFans channel or a production studio site like Brazzers.
Of course, we can't ever guide our children to healthy relationships with sex and pornography unless we actually talk about pornography with our children, which as a society we are not well-equipped to do.
It’s been a thing in the conservative (in the very broad sense, where this includes a substantial subset of the Democratic Party, as well as most of the GOP) end of US politics for a long time to ban, restrict, and discourage (by requiring private information that is guaranteed to eventually be exposed) access to porn for a long time, e.g., while it did not explicitly require ID, the Communication’s Decency Act of 1996 required age verification, which sites attempted to comply with (before it was struck down) by requiring credit cards on file for even free accounts.
Somewhat similar requirements were included in the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 (which was also struck down.)
COPA being struck down chilled legislative pursuit of this, though not the desire for it; I suspect the reason it has come up again now is the evidence that we have a Supreme Court majority that is both ideologically socially conservative and much less concerned about established precedent, at least on politically salient issues of interest to their social ideology, than has been the case in living memory (or, perhaps, ever), and legislators want to take full advantage of that while it lasts.
It'll start with having no passwords to remember, but before you know it parts of the internet will quit working if you don't have a big tech company vouching for you (not a bot, is an adult, etc.). As long as you log in with your Microsoft/Google/Apple account everything will be great, but if you don't nothing will work.
Non-tech people will be easily convinced with claims that logging in everywhere ensures bots and bad actors are excluded while "good" users can surf anywhere without hitting captchas, etc..
I don't know that this is the work of ALEC, but its existence and goal is hardly some secret conspiracy.