What will be lost are the smaller "ethical porn" companies. Larger production companies and tube sites are already based overseas or have the capacity to move to countries that are unlikely to cooperate with U.S. Since verification must be done well before a website viewer becomes a customer, it's as though a brick-and-mortar clothing shop had to pay a dollar every time someone looked in the window. The age verification procedures required by new laws will be far more expensive and time-intensive. One web developer recalls being tasked with "pixelating" a body part on Vivid's homepage after the company put up a billboard in Times Square: "The difference between nipple and not-nipple was the exact placement of a few shades of color in a 2-3 pixel grid." No matter how minimal, the nipple had to be nixed ahead of that large of a promotion. The sites usually displayed minimal previews on the front page and kept most of the explicit stuff behind a paywall. Before the advent of free tube sites-platforms for user-uploaded videos-it was standard practice for California-based studios with their own pay sites to require users to state they were 18 or older and allowed to view the content in their location. Pornographers were searching for suitable age verification methods long before lawmakers decided to impose them. Some cited fears of retaliation, while others expressed reluctance to go on the record during a time of immense industry upheaval. Most of my adult industry colleagues, including legal representatives of studios, declined to be named or to speak at all for this piece.
Other countries, including Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, have also developed legal requirements for consumer age verification.
Similar laws followed in Utah, Mississippi, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, and Texas. The act features phrases familiar to those of us who work with sexuality, such as "prurient interest" and "lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." These phrases are vague and subjective, as is the language describing which age verification mechanisms are acceptable to the state. This legislative trend started in 2022 with Louisiana's Act 440, which requires websites containing more than 33.3 percent "material harmful to minors" to engage in age verification processes for each site user. But a wave of laws requiring specific forms of age verification for viewers of websites that depict or discuss sexuality is threatening to wipe out small studios and solo self-producers. For the first time in history, performers have the bulk of power in the porn industry.
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