California Getting Close to Passing Porn Site Age Verification Law

The California State Assembly’s new Act, Assembly Bill 3080, mandates that porn websites available in the state verify the age of their users. The bill received unanimous support on May 16, passing the Assembly floor with 65 out of 80 “yes” votes and zero “no” votes. Fifteen Assembly members abstained from voting.

The bill still requires the Senate and Governor’s approval. If enacted, California will become the seventeenth US state to approve age verification on adult sites since Louisiana first did in 2022.

Bill 3080 (or the Parent’s Accountability and Child Protection Act) will require adult sites to take “reasonable steps” to verify that visitors from the state are 18 or older. Methods could include sharing non-prepaid credit card information or government-issued IDs that contain the name, age, description, and picture of the person with the site.

To safeguard individual privacy, the bill specifies that any collected data must ensure user anonymity and refrain from creating a record of the user’s online activity.

This law also applies to companies and individuals selling adult products like fireworks, BB guns, body branding, and e-cigarettes.
California State Assemblymembers Rebecca Bauer-Kahan and Juan Alanis back the legislation, stating that the bill is not intended to harm the adult industry or its workers. Instead, its focus is on protecting children from harmful exposure to explicit content online.

However, various advocacy groups and porn companies continue to rally against these age verification laws. During the state judiciary committee hearing, advocacy groups argued that such laws would drive people to visit other sites that don’t comply with the state’s regulations, especially since major porn sites have simply stopped operating in Texas and other states as a result of these age verification requirements.

Allison Bowden, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, a trade group for the porn industry, informed the judiciary committee that in states with the age-verification requirement, less than 1% of porn site users actually complete the process.

“What they do, according to our data, is hit the back button and find a site that doesn’t comply with the law,” she said. Quoting an internal study, Bowden said that “since the Texas law took effect in September, [..] traffic to a very large overseas site that openly defies all US laws grew 55%. Traffic to a site that hosts ‘leaked’ videos without verifying the age or identity of the people depicted in them grew 1,500%.”

Bowden also questioned the effectiveness of online ID verification, especially given the ease of creating fake IDs with artificial intelligence. Instead, she suggested using phone-enabled age verification as an alternative, a method also supported by Assemblymember Bauer-Kahan and executive director of the Age Verification Providers Association, Iain Corby.