Bill Requiring Age Verification for Online Pornography Gains Traction In Assembly

A bill requiring age verification to access online pornography continued to gain traction among both Republicans and Democrats this week amid a looming Assembly Judiciary Committee vote.

Assembly Bill 3080, authored by Assemblyman Juan Alanis (R-Modesto) would specifically expand the Parent’s Accountability and Child Protection Act to require a person or business that conducts business in California and seeks to make available products that are illegal to make available to minors, to take reasonable steps to ensure that the purchaser is of legal age at the time of purchase or delivery. The bill would provide that reasonable steps include, but are not limited to, requiring the user to input, scan, provide, or display a government-issued identification, requiring the user to use a nonprepaid credit card or debit card for online access, or implementing a system that enables only individuals with accounts designated as adult accounts to access the internet website.

AB 3080 would essentially make sure that only adults are accessing pornographic and other adult-adjacent websites and services.

The bill is based on laws in other states, which added similar age verification measures to their websites to access. Recently, Texas legislation became law, with the world’s largest free porn site, Pornhub, withdrawing from the state entirely last month as a result. As Pornhub and other sites have a tendency to withdraw from states with such age verification measures, it’s possible they can do the same to California.

Going into this session, AB 3080 had much support, including from the California Catholic Conference, California Family Council, Concerned Women for America, and the Pacific Justice Institute Center for Public Policy. In a statement earlier this year, the groups specifically said they are in support of the bill because “It is a step toward protecting children from accidental or unintentional exposure to obscene and indecent images and videos.”

However, at the same time, many first amendment groups, electronic freedom groups, and LGBT groups came out in Opposition. This included the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which said, “Age verification laws don’t just impact young people. It’s necessary to confirm the ages of all website visitors. It is a significant privacy violation to require all people to submit either their official government-issued identification credentials, or to delve into their transactional history, including bank account information, to attempt to determine their age, particularly if that person is an adult for whom there are no restrictions to view such material.”

Despite the opposition, the first vote on the bill earlier this month in the Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee proved to be surprising, as it was passed by a 10-0 vote with only one member not voting. While AB 3080 is expected to face stiffer resistance in later committees, especially the next Assembly Judicial Committee vote, it is also gaining traction in both houses with concerns over sexually explicit material and the ease minors have accessing.

🎉 #AB3080 Age Verification for Online Pornography by
Assembly Member Juan Alanis passed its first committee 10-0!

Iain Corby Executive Director of the Age Verification Providers Association testified in support of #AB3080

Iain explains how the age verification works! pic.twitter.com/TWwuXnYmkC

— CA Family Council (@CAFamily) April 18, 2024

“This isn’t like 20-30 years ago where kids just came across a Playboy or Hustler while going out into the woods or getting a porno from their older brother,” explained internet security specialist Gerald Hauser to the Globe on Thursday. “The internet just has everything out there. Age verification measures, like what California is right now trying to do, it can quell some of it. There is a lot of websites though, and some don’t always come with age verification. Hell, it can even be as simple as doing a Google search with the safe search off.”

“But with this bill, it would mean more hoops to jump through for minors if they wanted to access it. And parents or guardians would generally have an easier time to find out what they were up to. More hoops means more searches, and that means a bigger search history to go through.”

“We’re still in the early days of reigning all this in. The internet is still the wild west, and when it comes to minors searching for things, they can still access a lot. I mean, a lot of sexually explicit sites right now just ask you ‘Are you over 18/21?’ with no other ways to verify. This, as the bill says, creates those new steps.”

AB 3080 is due to be heard next in the Assembly Judicial Committee.