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Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

texasattorneygeneral.gov

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Re: Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

#41

Post by ranguna »

msftgreed wrote: post #34

So a state (or municipality or anyone capable of making laws) has the ability to say, "You don't meet our local laws, take down your URL" now? This is going to be a real problem when states start nuking whole parts of the internet from orbit. A state has a law against conversion therapy and starts to remove sites with that? A state has a law against trans people? Or abortion? Or medical misinformation? Suddenly we ju…

I thought this was always the case?

But what people do instead is to disable access for people from that specific state.

Re: Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

#42

Post by gpm »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #35
regecks wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need it, they've migrated to motherless.xxx.

> Stuart Lawley, the CEO of ICM Registry--the company behind the XXX top level domains, says XXX sites should help empower parents to keep their kids away from adult content. https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/man-behind-xxx-domains-say...

Also in the US - strange choice

Re: Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

#43

Post by TurdF3rguson »

msftgreed wrote: post #34

So a state (or municipality or anyone capable of making laws) has the ability to say, "You don't meet our local laws, take down your URL" now? This is going to be a real problem when states start nuking whole parts of the internet from orbit. A state has a law against conversion therapy and starts to remove sites with that? A state has a law against trans people? Or abortion? Or medical misinformation? Suddenly we ju…

It seems like it's pretty easy to comply. Pornhub and others don't have any problems complying with TX.

Re: Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

#44

Post by Waterluvian »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #6

The domain name is motherless.com if that's what you wanted to know. It's a porn site.

I recognize the unusual name. They were also off recently due to a Dutch issue

https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/08/europe/porn-site-motherless-t...

Re: Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

#45

Post by abraham »

TurdF3rguson wrote: post #43
msftgreed wrote: post #34

So a state (or municipality or anyone capable of making laws) has the ability to say, "You don't meet our local laws, take down your URL" now? This is going to be a real problem when states start nuking whole parts of the internet from orbit. A state has a law against conversion therapy and starts to remove sites with that? A state has a law against trans people? Or abortion? Or medical misinformation? Suddenly we ju…

It seems like it's pretty easy to comply. Pornhub and others don't have any problems complying with TX.

According to this pornhub is blocked in 25 states including Texas.

https://mashable.com/article/pornhub-blocked-states-2025

Re: Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

#46

Post by kobalsky »

msftgreed wrote: post #34

So a state (or municipality or anyone capable of making laws) has the ability to say, "You don't meet our local laws, take down your URL" now? This is going to be a real problem when states start nuking whole parts of the internet from orbit. A state has a law against conversion therapy and starts to remove sites with that? A state has a law against trans people? Or abortion? Or medical misinformation? Suddenly we ju…

I mean the US works like this, it isn't suprising a US state also does.

If someone from the US does something illegal on your site (which is legal in your country), depending on how much they want you will end up in a US prison.

Before the US decided that betting online was OK, betting sites had travel advisories for their employees not to travel to the US.

Re: Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

#48

Post by [deleted] »

15155 wrote: post #33
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that, more appropriately, only affects internet users in that country (ignoring the cloudflare network blocking that causes various other sites to also be blocked). This appears to basically wipe the site from the entire internet, for all countries.

When you create the infrastructure, you make the rules. If a party doesn't like those rules, they are free to create their own replacement infrastructure and obtain global buy-in. ccTLDs already exist and their respective countries have sovereignty over those TLDs: the UK can disappear any .uk domain name it wants from the global internet. The .com TLD is American, and is therefore subject to American legal proceedin…

[deleted]

Re: Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

#49

Post by walrus01 »

The idea that a state court in one particular state can enforce such an absurd law against a company that likely has no business operations or servers in the state is ridiculous. I don't care if you like the porn site in question or not, or condone or endorse its content. This is a slippery slope towards every regional tinpot dictator legislature attempting to censor the internet by having an entity's domain name revoked.

.com in particular has also been well proven over the past 5 to 10 years to be vulnerable to federal court orders to seize domains at the registrar level. That's not really anything new. It's a known risk for anyone building a corporate brand/identity around a specific .com domain name. What's new is this is being done from the state court level. (Edit: To be clear, in my opinion, a US State court completely lacks jurisdiction on this matter).

Re: Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

#50

Post by walrus01 »

rblatz wrote: post #11

Default judgement, absolutely meaningless at this point as to how a court would rule against a plaintiff that actually showed up, respected the court’s authority, and defended itself.

Why should a Netherlands based company that publishes content on the internet entirely outside of this state's borders and jurisdiction be required to show up or respect its authority? By this logic if I'm sued in Turkey for publishing content on my web server hosted in California insulting Erdogan, I should have to go show up and defend myself in some kangaroo court.
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