Pornhub pushes for a return to Indiana's web browsers

State of play: Pornhub sent a letter to more than 300 state leaders across the country this week — including Gov. Mike Braun and Attorney General Todd Rokita — asking them to rethink or rescind laws that require adult website visitors to verify their age, Politico reports.

• The laws that exist now in roughly half of all states "demonstrably do not work" and effectively fail to shield the minors they were written to protect, plus they put "adults' personal data at risk," Pornhub wrote.

Flashback: Under an Indiana law that went into effect in 2024, websites that publish content harmful to minors (i.e., porn) have to verify that users are 18 or older.

• In response, PornHub blocked access to its site in Indiana, calling the state's photo ID rules unworkable, as it's done in nearly every other state with similar laws.

Reality check: Porn remains accessible, despite these laws.

• In an Axios review of active porn sites last year in Virginia — one of the first states to pass an age verification law — roughly 65% failed to ask for age verification in the state.
• And since 2023, Virginia has been one of the nation's top states for Google searches for VPN services, which let users route their internet traffic through other states or countries.

And that's kind of Pornhub's point with its letter and push for a law change.

• Instead of creating site-specific age verification requirements, Pornhub says lawmakers should put the responsibility on the tech giants — including Apple, Microsoft and Google — to make parental controls the default settings on their operating systems.

Yes, but: There's little indication that state lawmakers have an appetite to revisit the law.

• Rokita's office told Axios he would continue fighting to keep in place the protections the state passed.
• "The content on its sites is dangerous for children," a spokesperson said, "and our age-verification laws exist to protect them."