Pornhub says DeSantis’ porn crackdown is backfiring

For years, Florida politicians have pitched online age-verification laws as a way to keep kids away from pornography. Pornhub has a different assessment.

The world’s largest adult website says Florida’s law isn’t protecting children nearly as well as lawmakers promised. Instead, Pornhub argues, it’s pushing users toward sketchier websites, rewarding companies that ignore the rules, creating new privacy concerns for adults, and handing bad actors a competitive advantage.

In a blistering open letter (attached below) sent this week to more than 300 governors, attorneys general, and state lawmakers nationwide, Pornhub accused supporters of age-verification laws of embracing what it calls “performative, ineffective, and unenforceable” legislation. Florida officials were among the letter’s biggest targets.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, Attorney General James Uthmeier, and more than three dozen Florida legislators who backed the state’s age-verification law all received the message.

The company isn’t saying kids should have unrestricted access to porn. Quite the opposite. It says lawmakers are trying to solve the right problem with the wrong technology.

“Everyone subjected to these laws is more at risk than ever before of encountering online harm,” Pornhub writes.

The unusually aggressive lobbying effort comes as nearly half of U.S. states, including Arizona, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Texas, have enacted some form of online age verification for adult websites. Florida has become one of the movement’s highest-profile battlegrounds after lawmakers approved legislation requiring websites hosting material deemed harmful to minors to verify visitors’ ages before granting access.

Supporters say the law closes an obvious loophole in online child safety, while Pornhub says it mostly closes compliant businesses.

According to the company, when legitimate websites ask visitors to upload driver’s licenses, submit facial scans, or verify themselves using financial information, many users simply leave and find another website that doesn’t comply with the law.

The company points to the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act, where communications regulator Ofcom has reported that websites implementing age assurance have steadily lost market share while non-compliant services have become more popular. Pornhub argues the law unintentionally rewards operators willing to ignore regulators entirely.

The company also cites Texas, one of the first states to adopt mandatory age verification, claiming that many of the top search results for pornography still lacked any meaningful age checks years after the law took effect.

In Pornhub’s view, that’s the fundamental flaw with Florida’s approach: the internet doesn’t stop at state lines. Millions of websites operate across hundreds of jurisdictions, and regulators can realistically pursue only a fraction of them. That means companies following the rules risk losing visitors to websites operating overseas, outside U.S. enforcement, or simply willing to ignore state law.

“The internet is global,” the company wrote. “Site-based regulation is always going to encourage evasion.”

Pornhub proposes an alternative

Pornhub suggests shifting responsibility away from websites altogether. Instead of asking adults to verify their age every time they visit an adult website, download a dating app, or access other age-restricted services, the company wants lawmakers to require Apple, Google, and Microsoft to build age verification directly into their operating systems.

The idea is simple: Make every new phone, tablet, and computer kid-safe by default.

Adults would verify their age once in their device settings. Parents could leave restrictions in place for children. Websites wouldn’t have to collect sensitive identification documents from millions of users, and Pornhub argues privacy would improve because fewer businesses would ever possess that information.

Pornhub says Apple has already begun implementing a version of that system in the United Kingdom, where Pornhub says it has been testing device-based protections since April. According to Pornhub, the approach has proven harder for minors to bypass and is less vulnerable to common workarounds such as VPNs.

The proposal also conveniently moves the burden away from Pornhub and onto Apple, Google, and Microsoft — three of the world’s largest technology companies.

A long-running debate

Whether Tallahassee finds that argument persuasive is another matter.

Florida lawmakers have made online child safety a bipartisan priority in recent years, and age verification has become one of the signature policies championed by conservatives nationwide. Supporters argue that requiring adults to prove they’re adults before accessing pornography is no more controversial than checking identification before entering a strip club or buying alcohol.

Critics, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, counter that the internet doesn’t operate like a liquor store.

Civil liberties advocates have warned that centralized databases of IDs, facial scans, and other identifying information create significant privacy risks, while technology experts have questioned whether state-by-state rules can ever meaningfully police a borderless internet.

Pornhub’s letter leans heavily into those criticisms, repeatedly asking lawmakers for evidence that their laws have actually reduced children’s exposure to explicit material.

“We don’t believe such data exists,” the company wrote.

The company closes with an unusual invitation. Rather than continuing what it characterizes as an unwinnable game of regulatory whack-a-mole, Pornhub says it’s ready to work with governments, technology companies, and child-safety organizations on what it calls a “kid-safe-by-default” internet.

The letter marks a notable shift in one of the internet’s biggest regulatory fights. After years of simply challenging age-verification laws in court or blocking access in states that adopted them, Pornhub is making a public case that there’s a better way.

Gov. DeSantis’ office did not return New Times’ requests for comment via phone or email by the time of this reporting.