Well, this post isn’t particularly sexy or fun, but I try to follow some of the news around proposed age-verification laws that are being introduced in state legislatures around the US. So far nine states (Arkansas, Indiana, Mississippi, Louisiana, Montana, North Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia) have laws requiring age-verification for adult websites. It’s actually pretty hard to keep up with the flood of new legislation and the status of all the newly proposed laws. There’s even an age-verification bill in the works in California. Of course, the title of this post is maybe a bit misleading! I had to come up with something a little catchier than “The Realities and Possible Outcomes of Proposed Age-Verification Legislation in the US.” But there has been a big push to pass these kinds of laws in the last few years.
Of course, I would love to have a really workable and foolproof way to keep minors away from my website. But the problem with the age-verification legislation, which claims to try to solve this problem, is that it would require you to upload a scan of your driver’s license or passport even to view the free pages on Trannies In Trouble. Obviously, no one is going to want to do that, and rightly so. Having the government or some private company keep lists of people’s personal information cross-referenced with all the adult websites they visit is obviously not a good idea. The risks of hacking and blackmail and just plain embarrassment are obvious. And no one should have to disclose that information anyway. My understanding is that Pornhub has actually blocked themselves from being seen in the above states where these laws are in place to avoid dealing with the hassles of complying. There’s a good chance that these laws will eventually be struck down as unconstitutional anyway, but who can say for sure? If they were to pass an age-verification requirement in California (highly unlikely), and if it were actually enforced, I’d probably be out of business and commuting to that hypothetical office job in Pomona that I always talk about.
The intent behind these proposed laws of course appears perfectly valid: the desire to keep children away from porn. Again, I’m totally in favor of that. But of course, another secondary purpose of these laws is to simply make it harder to run a porn website. Certainly, the requirements of these laws, if put in place, would be onerous for people like me. The Free Speech Coalition (of which I’m a dues-paying member) has a nice article on the privacy issues and risks of fraud that these proposed laws would bring. If you’re not completely bored out of your mind with the subject, it is a very good analysis.
Insex – If the government really wanted to get rid of porn websites one of the easiest ways to do it would be to put pressure on the credit card companies, telling them to no longer process credit cards for porn sites. As I’ve mentioned before, that’s exactly what happened to the notorious (and very hot) website, Insex. PD, the founder of the site, explains in a very-good documentary (Graphic Sexual Horror) how Homeland Security contacted the billing company he was using and told them they believed that Insex was a front for money laundering for terrorists, a total bullshit story but enough to shut down the site. Something far less dramatic than that could also shut down numerous adult websites like mine who are trying to follow the rules.
In any case I wrote this post to just mention something that may – or may never – have an impact on Trannies In Trouble. Who knows where all the current legislation will lead – and again all this legislation may eventually be struck down – but for me at least, it’s worth trying to keep an eye on the developments. In any case, sorry if this post was dry as dust. I wish it wasn’t a subject that I even had to follow. Thanks for reading; hopefully the next post will be a little more sexy!