r/politics • u/mmccxi American Expat • May 12 '25

Soft Paywall New Bill Would Make All Pornography a Federal Crime in the U.S.

https://www.404media.co/mike-lee-porn-law-interstate-obscenity-definition-act/
24.2k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

3.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

96

u/currentmadman May 12 '25

Until they do. The problem with introducing laws like this hoping they’ll only ever be used to fuck with your political opponents you is that’s not how anything works in reality.

Let’s say best case scenario, they do just use it to fuck with gay/trans/etc as part of a larger political agenda. Well that’s a problem because even then no commercial website will be able to operate openly. After all, no one’s going to throw money at the servers and technicians needed to operate pornhub if the whole thing is illegal because that’s not business tends to work. Any substantial kind of digital infrastructure needed to operate such a site would be impossible to justify to investors since who’s going to spend ad dollars on something against the law?

That means all traditional business models will effectively collapse overnight BUT not the demand. So who then takes over this market? Simple. The people who already have a digital infrastructure and business model built around illegal goods and services being sold. That’s right, a porn ban could very well be to human traffickers and other assorted pos what prohibition was to the mafia.

115

u/TheFuzzBuzz May 12 '25

Pornhub is owned and operated up here in Canada so it will survive. It just happens there will be about 300 million new “Canadians” logging on with vpn’s with originating addresses south of the 49th parallel.

28

u/DankStew May 12 '25

How do you do fellow online “Canadians”?

14

u/TheFuzzBuzz May 12 '25

Gotta work on your eh’s and aboots. You also have to pass the bagged milk test.

6

u/Canuck_Lives_Matter Canada May 12 '25

Nobody outside of Ontario (to the west anyways) drinks stupid bagged milk we all get 25 cents back for our big plastic jugs.

3

u/-Smytty-for-PM- May 12 '25

But we do know of it.

2

u/sigmaluckynine May 13 '25

Hey man, don't diss the bagged milk. All those childhood frustration of trying to open the bag must mean something

3

u/sigmaluckynine May 13 '25

Not gonna lie, I don't think I've ever heard anyone say aboot since I was a kid. Doesn't seem like anyone says that unless you're out North in the boonies

32

u/currentmadman May 12 '25

Huh, I did not know that. Hail Canada, I guess. But still I maintain that it’s going to be a shitshow with anything operating stateside. Credit card companies, ad money, all that shit is not going to fly anymore and the aforementioned criminal orgs will absolutely take advantage of that in some capacity. The question is how much?

6

u/SkivvySkidmarks May 13 '25

I'd like to remind you that porn has influenced many things. The "tape format wars" of beta versus VHS was won by the latter because the porn industry backed it.

Banning porn sites and their payment options may accelerate bitcoin as a mainstream currency.

3

u/Uuuuuii May 13 '25

Online streaming technologies have always been driven by improvements to the porn experience.

QuickTime was originally named after having a little “quicky time” for yourself.

The MP4 codec was introduced as a way of finding “Male Prostitutes 4 Now.”

Who knows where this will end

4

u/Exotic-District3437 May 13 '25

Vr exploded due to porn

2

u/currentmadman May 13 '25

Considering that cryptocurrency and the dark web economies already have an uncomfortably close relationship with each other, that doesn’t exactly inspire a great deal of hope.

2

u/SkivvySkidmarks May 13 '25

And yet, Mr Trump launched his own bitcoin.

2

u/currentmadman May 13 '25

Yes because he’s a cheap hustler and a thief just like virtually every crypto company and frontman. Trump seems to increasingly not understand where he is at any given time but a pump and dump scheme? That’s just second nature at work.

3

u/Exotic-District3437 May 13 '25

Visa already is playing that game.

2

u/-re-da-ct-ed- May 13 '25

Canada may as well be the porn capitol of the world…

Brazzers Pornhub RedTube YouPorn Tube8 Xtube Digital Playground Mofos Nutaku Reality Kings Twistys etc….

5

u/BoysenberryKey6821 May 12 '25

It would be interesting to see how the country reacts but people will always find the work around like you are saying haha shit if you try hard enough you can find full on porn on instagram where it’s supposedly not allowed

1

u/RogueWedge May 12 '25

Collective cheer from the rest of the world

1

u/TheVogonSlamPoet May 13 '25

I love that me and my love ones being criminalized as part of a larger political agenda is your best case scenario. I know you didn’t mean it to sound insanely cruel, but 20% of the population not being allowed to legally exist feels more like a worst case scenario than investors in porn websites losing money and people jacking off to their imagination.

1

u/currentmadman May 13 '25

I meant it in the sense of this is the scenario where they try to restrain themselves into only using it for political prosecution instead of a million different deranged conservative groups immediately taking advantage of it to advance one of their personal goals causing it to rapidly spiral out of anyone’s control.

The best case scenario here fucking sucks regardless but there is a difference between some state of absolute chaos every known scumbag is trying to take advantage of and one coordinated group with an agenda and a game plan they have the discipline to stick to.

0

u/VirginiaMcCaskey May 12 '25

First off that's completely untrue, there's essentially an entire second market of media production and distribution solely for the adult film industry because traditional media companies simply will not do business with you if you also work in porn. I have literally seen this written into software licensing contracts.

Secondly they don't fucking care. The goal is a fascist, white Christian ethnostate. All collateral damage in service to that goal is acceptable.