> Like I said it's quite difficult to find information about this stuff.

Quite honestly, I don't think it is. I'm not an expert on this, I'm using the same search engines you're using. I'm able to find stuff online.

> I don't see it referenced on bugzilla.mozilla.org. Mozilla came up with their own proposal (Prefer: safe) in 2014 and actually submitted it to IETF, and didn't reference the Rating header. Did anyone try to tell them about it? They had like a 30% market share at the time. I can't find any references to it on issues.chromium.org either. I don't see any discussions on chromium's developer mailing list archives. I don't see it on the Android archives

This is a lot of critique that boils down to "browser makers and lawmakers didn't implement it." But porn companies are not in charge of browsers. I could ask the same question in the opposite direction -- lawmakers have literally entire teams of paid staff to research this stuff, they are literally required by law under strict scrutiny to research it... and like I said above, I'm able to find information when I search online. So why weren't they able to find anything?

I don't think this is an excuse, I don't think lawmakers need to babied about looking for potential solutions to bills when strict scrutiny is in play. Strict scrutiny does not say that the government should be narrow and specific and research alternatives unless nobody sent them an official proposal on letter paper in which case how were they to know, we can just do whatever, all rules are off. Strict scrutiny places an obligation on the government to do research.

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> That CNN article says Pornhub doesn't like Utah's law because they want on-device verification. Utah's law explicitly allows for that, and they already have a working system. It's in fact an ISO standard, and seems to have wide traction building among US states:

Looking more at it, I will say that MDL looks reasonably interesting, there's stuff here that I like quite a bit. I will also say that it's not available on Windows, Mac, or Linux, and that it doesn't look like it will ever work via 3rd-party ROMs. But sure, other than that it looks promising. And maybe Pornhub will adopt it at some point, I do think this system looks like it would be an improvement over a lot of ID verification I'm forced to do for services with KYC rules. So I'm all for that.

I will also point out that it's not available in Texas. And we have talked about this, you can't treat these laws like they're some kind of composite whole where one state addressing a problem means the other states no longer have that problem. Okay, you think that Pornhub is being disingenuous about Utah? Fine. The original link at the top of this thread is about VPN usage surging in Texas, which does not implement an MDL standard.

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> The reporting sucks. They didn't link to the laws. Almost none of the articles about this even name the laws (e.g. SB 287) so you have to go searching for it.

> [...] Why don't the reporters ask for clarification on what appear superficially to be contradictions?

This is not specific to these laws, all political reporting about bills has this problem. Every time that I want to find the original text of a bill that's being reported on by even mainstream sites, I have to search for it. Could it be better? Sure, I regularly advocate that reporters should link to bill text. Do reporters in most interviews tend to ask only softball questions (regardless of who they're interviewing)? Yes. Does that common problem get rid of criticisms of the bills? No, it doesn't.

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> It's also disingenuous to characterize KYC services as shady. Their main customers are banks, and they're going to undergo annual audits for SOC 2, ISO 27001, etc. because every bank requires that.

I will 100% stand by my representation. Common KYC services are shady. Credit reporting services are shady. This entire information economy is shady; it doesn't matter if they're working with the government. We're only a few years out from Equifax (which is used for customer verification sometimes) leaking the financial information of nearly every single adult American in the US. But what, they work with banks? They work with the people who haven't learned how to do proper 2FA yet? They work with the people who retain massive amounts of customer information and offer credit cards that are privacy nightmares? I have bad news for you about bank privacy in the US. None of these companies have a good track record on this.

I fully stand behind my characterization of them: these services are shady and should not be expanded recklessly to other areas of our life. I think that's an easy conclusion to draw.

> Their entire business is legal compliance as a service. If the law says not to store your info, they wont.

3rd-party KYC services fundamentally can not work without storing your info. Like, by definition -- the requirement is literally know your customer. That involves... knowing them. And comparing pre-gathered information is still storing info. You can not do a "verify your identity by telling us something we already know" question without already knowing the answer to the question that you're asking.

> They complain they don't want to store whatever info. But the laws don't say they need to, and in fact say they must not.

We have been ever this multiple times already: no they do not. None of these laws ban storing metadata or linking identities to requests by these 3rd-party companies. There is nothing in these laws that clearly prevent a 3rd-party ID service from aggregating data about which users have accessed porn. None of these laws ban government storage of information (and once again, states have said that they want to have databases of LGBTQ+ citizens). The majority of these laws do not offer sufficient penalties to incentivize companies not to violate restrictions (user-brought lawsuits are not sufficient, data privacy laws get violated all the time). None of these laws clarify how long information can be retained and most don't clarify what damages a user would actually be entitled to if their information was leaked.

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I do want to loop back around to:

> Anyway, my original point was that the whole discussion seems to be disingenuous.

These bills have problems. At their best, even if MDL turns out to be great and private -- they're still going to increase user propensity to fall for phishing attacks, they still use a selective enforcement mechanism that will let off the worst actors, they still have 1st Amendment concerns, they still don't really address the majority of porn online (I will remind you that Reddit demands verification in zero of the states that have passed this legislation), they still have insufficient protections against data retention. They still require distinguishing between obscenity and porn on a scale that is impossible to do without abridging 1st-Amendment speech, and they still hue closely to similar federal attempts to legislate porn that have been ruled unconstitutional.

And we're reaching the point where we're basically arguing over "has Pornhub done enough? Why haven't they looked at this standard? Why didn't the government look at this standard? What is everyone's intentions?"

I want to take a step back and say that even if Pornhub did absolutely nothing (which again, I would argue they did not), that doesn't change anything at all about the objections to these bills. And if we're talking about disingenuous, it feels disingenuous to have a conversation that's constantly bouncing between incompatible statements like "this protects kids", and "R rated movies like 50 Shades of Grey wouldn't be covered", and "Mastodon wouldn't be affected" -- and to have all of those problems and contradictions swept under the rug in favor of "but Pornhub was asking for it."

We can look at the laws as implemented today and look at their effects and we can say objectively and indisputably -- they are not working. A lot of porn is still available in those states. So what the heck is the rest of this conversation? You don't need much evaluation beyond: you passed the law and r/insert-depraved-porn-sub is still available in your state without age verification, so... the law didn't work.

I do still feel like you're looking at this through a lens that misrepresents what most lobbying effort and what most political reporting looks like on every issue. But you know what? It doesn't matter. You think that Pornhub should have gotten more involved, great, that's very idealistic. You want political reporting to get better, great, that's an effort I can get behind. It doesn't mean that these bills don't have 1st Amendment concerns, don't contradict themselves in talking about retention and data collection while advocating 3rd-party services that literally can not operate without collecting data, it doesn't mean the bills aren't vague. And it doesn't mean the bills work. And I'm sorry if you don't like porn companies, but these are still bad laws. I'm sorry if you think that porn companies aren't playing nice, but you're still spreading misinformation about ID verification and 1st Amendment protections as they exist today that is just not true.

What is the disingenuous thing here: litigating whether or not Pornhub cares enough about kids, or dismissing obvious problems with legislation and spreading misinformation about that legislation just because you don't feel an industry was proactive enough in preempting it? I'll loop around again to -- I don't even care if you support the laws; fine. But don't say things about the laws that are not true.