Pornhub prepares to block five more states rather than check IDs

* They don't want the work to do the verification to be their problem, and to be legally responsible when (not if) it goes wrong.

* They know that age restricted devices are few and far between, so this is just an effort to kick the can down the road another decade.

* Even if all new devices support age restrictions, there will be a myriad of legacy devices that will continue to have access.

* They know people in the affected states will just use a VPN to another state anyway. If all the US eventually adopts these laws, they'll block the site entirely from the US and secretly fund and post informational videos on how to use VPNs to get around the restrictions.

* By blocking the states, they get more publicity for themselves, but also potentially anger a group of people into arguing their cause.

One thing that I think is interesting is that they are placing a lot of trust on reliable state-level geo-IP. They're only a few bad DB records or a BGP failure that routes people from these states to other servers away from a potentially costly fine. But maybe given the benefits above, this is just another cost of doing business for them.

They view pornography as a purely or at least sufficiently negative presence, justifying going after it. Legislating to withhold it from children is more straightforward and politically palatable than an outright ban. The deanonymization of the internet is probably an acceptable risk more than a desired outcome.

I assume it's the same mindset as people who end free speech to crusade against hate speech.

I don't know if that's what you're talking about but, in Belgium for example, to fill taxes online and to do various other types of pointless administratrivia you must use your EID card, which you put in an EID card reader (typically connected by USB).

Now the EU-wide biometrics, a sheer horror (the EU court of justice ruled that the biometrics data can be used for other uses and stored in databases outside the card... although at first it was supposed to be private), isn't implemented all around the EU yet.

My EID car was emitted in 2016 and is valid until 2026 and definitely doesn't have any biometrics data in it. I don't know if the system shall already be put in place in 2026 when I'll have to renew it for another ten years.

My point being: biometrics and NFC are probably not present on a lot of EU citizens' ID cards... Yet. So, atm, it probably doesn't make much economical sense to support that system for random usecases like selling cigarettes or alcohol.

Filing my taxes is the only thing I use my EID for.

Then there are some EU countries using their own "2FA" authentication system for anything "government related" (taxes, car registration, company filings, banks login, social security, etc.), complete with physical devices, phone apps, webapps, etc. which aren't using the EU EID at all. Basically: an entire ID system, using 2FA, but bypassing the EID entirely.

I'd say overall it's still pretty much the wild west.