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Comment by sneed_chucker | Hacker News Reader

VPNs make short work of these blocks in Texas just as they do in large parts of the Middle East and Eastern Asia where porn is illegal. Assuming you're an adult and are able to pay for and set up a VPN.

That aside, I'm not convinced unfettered access to all varieties of hardcore pornography is a good thing for society, especially kids.

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Will they criminalize VPNs? I guess that is the next question.

In Middle Eastern countries every home has a VPN subscription, it is an open secret, and there is no effort to crack down on it or block it (i.e. not like China). It lets the government say "We banned the naughty stuff," while allowing their citizenry to rightly access everything at the same time.

The only people put out by the bans in the Middle East are tourists fresh off the plane who didn't do their research.

Seems unlikely. VPNs have far too many legitimate uses. How many people are on VPNs for work alone?

I also don't think the law in Texas is written against the consumer, e.g. it doesn't say it's illegal to view porn if you haven't shown an ID. Rather, it's levied against the distributor to say it's illegal to show porn to someone you haven't age verified.

So it's not like the act of using the VPN to circumvent this would be criminal.

OK, that makes perfect sense, thank you.

The ME is obviously a bit of a different situation as they run ISP-based firewall rules to outright ban unwanted sites.

And they're training people to use VPNs, which should be a mandatory facet of tech literacy anyway! :D Win-win

I was in China earlier this year. Most of the popular and well known VPN endpoints were blocked. Even with stealth oriented settings. It would be pretty easy for government workers to sign up for the top 10 services, see all their endpoints and just blacklist them.

However, the VPN I had setup at my house worked fine and had no issues with being blocked on the basic VPN setup.

I don't think US states can really criminalize VPNs. Countries can, but I don't see how a state is going to justify a VPN ban. They're clearly useful for all sorts of things, and it's awfully hard to confirm what it's used for.

And it would be a big overreach of state powers IMHO.

It would definitely be odd. I don't see the tech companies rolling over and allowing it to happen. How do other countries police VPNs? Is it only at the border?

I think technically a state could legislate against it. States have some laws in the US already which would probably raise eyebrows. Illinois makes it up to 5 years in prison to violate the ToS of a web site, for instance. People say to me, "But it's not enforced!"... I'd rather you argue that to the judge at your bail hearing.

They don't need to criminalize VPNs.

Instead, they will find some child who used a VPN to access porn, then sue PornHub for failing to validate the child's age.

Is that legal? I have no idea. You'll have to ask six Federalist Society judges on the Supreme Court.

The UAE for example has laws that some interpret as being anti-VPN, with some also using it to get around anti-VoIP laws in that country, but the enforcement of that is pretty much weak.

I could never get a straight answer. Everyone kinda snorts and laughs if you ask about it, "Like, really?" I tried translating Arabic statutes. I don't want to test ME laws because they generally have Sharia for the locals and a standard criminal code for foreigners, but that all sounds like a recipe for A Bad Time(tm).

It ain't no China, though. It's a really flimsy attempt to block things. Skype worked perfectly, but not Facetime, even though not having an iPhone for natives was like not owning a Toyota Landcruiser.

The reason they want this is so they can (1) eliminate it and (2) publicly shame those that use it when details are leaked or the zeitgeist swings even further in their favor.

The solution is for parents to be mindful of their children and not allow them to use the internet without supervision.

We shouldn't become a nanny state or a spy state because of bad parenting.

I'm generally sympathetic to not allowing negligent parenting to encourage "nanny state" regulations to be put into place. But the meat space equivalent to the age verification here seems to be something like age verification for buying alcohol, tobacco, or a firearm. Would we not want to verify a potential purchaser's age because "the solution is for parents to be mindful of their children and not allow them to buy firearms/tobacco/booze without supervision"? My guess is fewer people would be onboard with that. What's the difference?

The difference is showing my id to a minimum wage liquor store worker for a few seconds vs giving my id to a company and trusting them to store it indefinatly and tying my internet presence to my actual identify all for a law that would be at best a minor hinderance for underaged people wanting to access pornography

Many state issued IDs are now machine readable. I've had my ID scanned when I went to buy some beer before. I assume I trusted them to store it indefinitely, tying my real-world presence to my actual identity to comply with a law that is a minor hindrance to underage people wanting to access alcohol. (I don't know if the person who scanned my ID made minimum wage, though. Probably.)

Guns blow your heads off or 20-50 of your least favored classmates and alcohol and tobacco kill millions and young people are very vulnerable to addiction.

It's not clear that there is a similar effect from seeing boobs.

You've set up a strawman argument. If viewing pornography on the internet only meant "seeing boobs," age verification surely wouldn't have gained as much traction as it has in the US and UK. But there's a lot more than that. It's disingenuous to ignore that fact.

Please quantify the dangers of pornography and explain why site level age verification is a better option vs device level blocking available to parents.

> The solution is for parents to be mindful of their children and not allow them to use the internet without supervision.

I hate carrying water for these shitty laws, but I don't think it's possible to stop a sufficiently motivated child from obtaining unfettered access to the Internet. I don't think it's about "bad parenting".

Even if you take VPNs out of the equation, all you're going to do is push people towards other sites that don't care. There's no shortage of websites that offer porn that people can just go to instead. The only people that you're going to remotely stop are the most tech illiterate possible that don't understand they can just go to the next site in the search. You know, the ones with basically no press attention that have lax moderation policies and allow basically anything through.

> The solution is for parents to be mindful of their children and not allow them to use the internet without supervision.

You're missing it. It's not just your own kids. It's your kids going to their friend's house and their friend's older sibling showing them something. And this is a one-way street. They can't unsee things they're too young for.

> We shouldn't become a nanny state or a spy state because of bad parenting.

You should see all the social services infrastructure designed to protect children from bad (or worse) parents.

The access isn't unfettered, it's very fettered. You need to purchase internet service, which only adults can do. The problem is those adults, which purchase it, do absolutely nothing to restrict access for their kids.

It's like buying alcohol, and then keeping it in water bottles in your fridge and complaining your kid keeps getting drunk. At that point the problem isn't the laws or society, it's you!

I wonder why an ISP in offending states hasn't yet taken the opportunity to offer a VPN as a package solution. It could be an easy value add for less tech literate users.

Realistically, being able to pay for a VPN (i.e. having a credit card) is actually probably sufficient proof that you are of age, so go ahead.

What about prepaid credit cards, or Tor?

Or kids will be driven to free VPNs that track them/inject ads into them/etc

Can you provide valid peer reviewed scientific evidence that porn has any effect at all on society?

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/twenty-year-sentence-gi...

That particular porn had negative effects on a lot of people. Not society in full, but trafficking does have a serious negative impact, and demand for porn drives some demand for trafficking.

So is getting paid in cash a problem because some of it could have been stolen from a bank?

That's a human trafficking example, not a porn one.

There human trafficking problem in plenty of activities, from housework to construction, restaurant and agriculture. Would you argue that demand for these activity drive demande for trafficking ?

Arguably virtually free porn on the internet would seem to make individual production of porn dramatically less valuable while 20 year sentences make unethical tactics like that more dangerous and less worthwhile. Conversely banning legit porn would seem to make it more valuable and whilst it wouldn't make it less dangerous to get caught it would create a subculture of somewhat ethical people doing marginally illegal but not immoral things in which bad actors could hide. Also those looking to make some of that presumably increased money could intend to engage with this semi legit subculture and end up dealing with one of the aforementioned bad actors thus increasing the chance that people end up trafficked.

Age verification probably wouldn't even do this. What would most likely happen is that it would drive more traffic to increasingly less legit sites and make real regulation impossible.

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