Age verification laws, from Louisiana to the Supreme Court, Britain, France and Italy

On 1 January 2023 Louisiana began asking porn viewers to prove their age with a phone app, and within three years about half the American states, Britain, France and Italy were doing the same. Pornhub switched off whole states and countries in protest, and the Supreme Court sided with the states.

Louisiana, 1 January 2023. A new state law, Act 440, comes into force. Any website on which at least a third of the material is pornographic must now check that visitors from Louisiana are adults, and a site that fails to do so can be sued. When people in the state open Pornhub, they are sent to an outside service and asked to prove their age with LA Wallet, the phone app that holds the Louisiana driving licence¹.

It looked like a local experiment. Within three years age verification laws covered about half the American states, had been upheld by the Supreme Court, and had spread to Britain, France and Italy. For the first time since the arrival of the internet, a viewer of porn, gay or straight, was asked at the door who he was. This is the story of how the age verification laws arrived, what the courts said and how the porn industry answered.

An old idea on a new phone

The idea was not new. In 1998 Congress passed the Child Online Protection Act, which required commercial websites to put material "harmful to minors" behind checks such as a credit card. It never took effect. In 2004 the Supreme Court upheld an injunction against it, holding that filtering software installed by parents was a less restrictive way to protect children, and the law was finally dead by 2009².

What changed was the phone. Louisiana had launched LA Wallet in 2018 as a digital driving licence, and by 2023 it had more than 1.4 million active users. Act 440, sponsored by the state representative Laurie Schlegel, could lean on it: the state already had a way for residents to prove their age with a tap¹.

The law had two features that later laws copied. It did not create a crime but let parents sue sites that failed to verify age, and it ordered that the identifying information must not be kept once access had been granted¹.

A state goes dark

Utah was next, and it chose a different design. Its law, SB 287, passed unanimously and required anyone visiting an adult site to prove their age each time, through a government record or a third-party service. Its sponsor, the Republican senator Todd Weiler, put the reasoning simply: "You should be able to have to prove you're an adult to view pornography because it's illegal for children to view it"³.

Utah had no digital ID like Louisiana's, and Pornhub's owner said it could not comply. On Monday 1 May 2023, two days before the law took effect, visitors from Utah found that the site had "made the difficult decision to completely disable access to the website in Utah"³.

Users found ways round it. A local reporter noted that, according to Google Trends, Utah was suddenly searching for virtual private networks more than twice as much as any other state. The Free Speech Coalition, the trade association of the adult industry, sued, and its spokesman Mike Stabile predicted that the state would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars defending a law it would lose³.

Texas and the road to Washington

The decisive case came from Texas. In 2023 its legislature passed House Bill 1181, which required age checks on sites where more than a third of the content was harmful to minors, and also ordered them to display warnings about the supposed health dangers of pornography. A federal judge blocked the law before it took effect. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals let the age checks go ahead but struck down the health warnings⁴.

Pornhub withdrew from Texas in March 2024. By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, about two dozen states had passed similar laws, almost all of them with Republican legislatures.

Six votes to three

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case on 2 July 2024 and heard arguments on 15 January 2025. On 27 June 2025, in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, it upheld the Texas law by six votes to three⁴.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority. Earlier cases had applied the strictest test to laws that limited adults' access to sexual material; this time the Court used a lighter one, intermediate scrutiny, and found that the Texas law "only incidentally burdens the protected speech of adults". Its earlier decisions, Thomas wrote, had dealt with the internet as it existed in the 1990s, before smartphones and streaming⁴.

Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented. She accepted that states could protect children, but argued that the law should have faced the strictest test, because adults entitled to see the material might give it up rather than hand over their identity⁴.

The ruling settled the constitutional question for the United States. Laws that had been on hold could be enforced, and more states followed.

Britain: highly effective

Britain had tried first and failed. The Digital Economy Act of 2017 included age checks for porn sites, but after repeated delays the government abandoned that part of the law in October 2019.

The second attempt was the Online Safety Act of 2023. From 25 July 2025 every service showing porn to people in the United Kingdom had to use "highly effective" age assurance, such as matching a selfie to an ID document, estimating age from a face or checking a credit card. In the first month, according to the regulator Ofcom, Pornhub's British traffic fell by just under a third⁵.

Ofcom began fining sites that ignored the rules, and Aylo, as Pornhub's owner was now called, chose to pull back. From 2 February 2026 only British users who already had a verified account could reach the site. The company said the law had "diverted traffic to darker, unregulated corners of the internet", and its vice-president Alex Kekesi argued that "circumvention is rampant, privacy is compromised"⁵.

France: Marianne switches off

France had passed its law to secure and regulate the digital space, known as SREN, in May 2024. It gave the media regulator Arcom the power to set technical standards for age checks and to block sites that did not meet them, and a ministerial order of 26 February 2025 extended the duty to seventeen porn sites based in other European Union countries, Pornhub, YouPorn and RedTube among them.

On 4 June 2025, as the deadline arrived, Aylo cut off its three sites for French users and replaced them with a statement against the law. Arcom answered that the group had chosen to evade the imperative of protecting minors⁶.

A Paris administrative court then suspended the order for sites based elsewhere in the EU, pending the question of whether it was compatible with European law, and on 20 June the sites came back online⁷. The reprieve lasted less than a month. On 15 July 2025 the Conseil d'État, France's highest administrative court, restored the order, and Aylo blocked its sites again.

Italy: double anonymity

Italy came last of the four, with the most careful design. A decree of 2023 on youth crime, known after the town of Caivano, gave the communications authority AGCOM the task of making porn sites verify age. Its rules, adopted in 2025 as resolution 96/25/CONS, rest on what it calls double anonymity: the site learns only that the visitor is an adult, and the company that checks the age does not learn which site he wants to visit⁸.

The obligation began on 12 November 2025 for a first list of sites that included Pornhub, YouPorn, xHamster and OnlyFans. According to Il Post, sites based abroad were given until early 2026, and those that did not comply risked fines of up to 250,000 euros and having access blocked⁹.

Who pays at the door

For gay porn the new laws have a particular weight. Gay audiences are a minority everywhere, often scattered across small towns where privacy matters, and many men who watch gay porn are not out. Handing an ID or a face scan to a website is a different act for them than for a straight viewer.

The cost falls unevenly on businesses too. A giant like Aylo can afford to fight in court or switch off whole countries; a small gay studio selling to a few thousand subscribers cannot build a separate system for every American state and every European regulator. Many have chosen to block the places with the strictest rules, and the map where gay porn can be watched without showing an ID has shrunk year by year.

Supporters of the laws answer that children had for twenty years been only a click away from material no shop would sell them. Whether the checks protect children or simply push viewers towards VPNs and unregulated sites is the argument that now runs through every parliament and court that takes up the question. The wider story of these years is told in the chapter on the creator economy.