Texas Web-Porn Law Protects Kids Without Harming Adults
The Supreme Court must see that the technological gains that make it so easy for children to access adult content also make it far more efficient for users to prove they are of age.
Are you really?
Photographer: Leon Neal/Getty Images
Today, the state of Texas will argue before the US Supreme Court that the government can restrict children’s access to online pornography without harming the free speech rights of adults. Parents — and all Americans — should hope the justices will see that new technologies can lead them to find Texas’s effort constitutional.
In Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, the court will decide if states can require pornographic websites to verify the age of their users — a potential watershed case for internet regulation. The Texas law, HB 1181, like other recent state laws recently, requires pornography websites to effectively restrict their content to users over 18. (We are both amici curiae in the case.) The Supreme Court last addressed this issue two decades ago, striking down federal age-verification laws in Reno v. ACLU (1997) and Ashcroft v. ACLU (2004). But the court now faces a transformed technological landscape: Protecting kids online has become nearly impossible for parents, while age verification has become simple and anonymous.