Blocking Pornhub access in Canada an option, owners say. Here’s why

The goal is to erode privacy, and the pearl clutching about children is always the excuse. There are a lot of groups who want to eliminate privacy online: cops, copyright holders, and religious nuts to name a few. They're the ones driving this stuff.

If age verification is really the intent then it ought to be possible to develop a service these websites can call into that gives some kind of zero-knowledge age check. The age check service doesn't need to know the identity of the service that's asking, and the requesting service doesn't need to know the identity of the person whose age they're checking. You'd authenticate on a site that only knows someone's doing an age check, and the verifying site would just get a token indicating that the age check was successful.

Am I missing some reason why this wouldn't be possible? It seems to be a problem ripe for zero-knowledge solutions.

If it is possible, there's really no need for an age check requirement to involve disclosing your identity to the site you're visiting, or to disclose your viewing habits to anyone. And if governments or lobbyists are pushing for everyone to upload their full identity to web sites, it suggests either they're ignorant or their motives aren't what they claim.

Equivalent of CRA now or as an implementation that you’re familiar with “sign in with google”

The worry security wise is less about it getting leaked as it is opening a new string of fake websites (because the government data getting leaked/attacked is already an issue)

Harms the youth isn't even the best anti-pornography argument. Sexual exploitation and sex trafficking are concerns. But that's more of an issue with unethical porn (always watch ethically sourced porn folks!)

On the other hand, since the age of internet porn, sexual irresponsibility, teen sex, rape, and divorce have all declined. (Correlation)

There seems to be a lot of issues with the methodology used in those studies.

For example, "...reported hours of pornography consumption per week....". Hours seems excessive. What's the average duration for all visitors?

And, "Women were excluded from the research, because men more easily encounter such problems due to their frequent contact with pornographic materials.". That's an assumption. Women can also have "frequent contact " with porn, so they should have included women.

And one of them seemed to suggest that men who watched more porn had ED. But maybe men with ED first, have had to use porn to help? Chicken and egg situation.

I'm not defending porn, and I tend to make data driven choices.

But I'm acutely aware that methodology can have averse effects on the conclusion, and I tend to be highly skeptical of studies that appear to manipulate the outcome with their selection bias.

Check the financing on those.

Funny how people just down vote when someone actually provide sources

Same with Alcohol for those points you listed.

eventually we’ll need to figure out proper age verification and identification for some things

Don't we already have identity verification for many sites where our personal identity matters - banking, government stuff, etc? For the rest, it's like trying to change the color of the sky cause we don't like blue. Short of a fundamental protocol-level change of how the internet works (won't happen any time soon), or adding a centralized level of control like China's Great Firewall and/or forcing ISP-level censorship on top of outlawing VPNs (you'll probably be hard-pressed to make a good argument for this), controlling what one can access on the internet just won't happen.

Also not sure why anyone would think it's a good idea to hand over our personal information to random websites, even if just for "age verification". I can't even trust my bank with my data, giving it to random commercial sites that have all the incentives in the world to track my consumption habits and link them to my personal identity would be utterly idiotic, porn or not. Hell, we're already doing it with Facebook or Google tracking us across the web, now we want to be required by law to give them our ID as well?

It's a typical reactionary play to attack the surface of an issue without addressing the root problem. For this particular issue, blocking porn access on sites that will comply will just make it that they'll find their porn elsewhere, that's all, while ignoring the underlying education issue. It's a smoke show that literally doesn't address anything.

[...] eventually we’ll need to figure out proper age verification and identification for some things.

I don't mean to be a "specifics sam" but why? In nearly every case I can think of legitimately dangerous activities (like buying radium or a gun) already necessarily require the user to have access to a credit card or PayPal. Porn is weird specifically because the vast vast majority of porn is just advertising to find the few whales that spend massive amounts of money on it.

So, like, what's an example of some other kind of content that's free that we don't want children to look at but we're okay with adults looking at?

Key point in my opinion is the definition of « what things » should be so tightly regulated wrt to age for one thing. I doubt access to porn by minors is a proven societal problem and even more so that the proposal to solve via the verification mechanism is proportionate.

This reeks of puritan religious bullshit.

Anecdotally I didn’t turn out to be a psycho as much as my relatives that piously shy away from porn.

Is that not free yet? Huh

If there were a standardized large scale mesh network I would be all over that. Like if everyone agreed (before governments get too handsy) on a TCP/IP over HAM setup, a 'free' internet could be built and ready to go when the corporate owned networks go 1984.