Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed lawsuits on Tuesday against the parent companies of Chaturbate and xHamster, claiming that the sites are not complying with the state’s controversial age verification law, HB 1181.
Archived version: https://archive.ph/3s70h
I think it’s like alcohol and tobacco sales. The state doesn’t place agents at every store to verify your ID, it’s the person selling the restricted goods that’s responsible.
The analogy isn’t quite right, though.
In this case, you are leaving the state (digitally) and going to a market where the goods are not restricted. The vendor is then packaging them up the same way they always do, and you’re bringing them back home with you. You can’t even really claim they’re “shipping” the goods. YOU provided all the shipping labels and all that, they just dropped it in the mailbox dutifully, like they do everything else.
…then the AG is suing the bodega you bought them from for not checking that you were from a state where it was restricted.
It seems to me if anyone should be getting sued, it’s either the ISP or the consumer. Both of which are politically infeasible; the first draws intense net neutrality implications on top of being an imposition among his homies and cronies in the ISPs and the latter would be unenforceable under current technological and legal paradigms.
Long term, we should ABSOLUTELY expect these christofascist lunatics to push us towards our own Great Firewall though. That’s definitely the endgame. They want total control over morality backed by the clenched fist of the state.
I’m by no means an expert, but that sounds more like saying when I walk into the tobacco store I’m leaving the public area (the road and the sidewalk) and entering private property (the store), so the responsibility is on the state to post guards outside the exits to make sure I don’t illegally possess tobacco while in public.
Honestly I think the answer is that the state can place the burden on whomever it wants for as long as the court cases take to get resolved.
Feels like that happened already when they turned on the algorithms in 2014.