The conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled 6-3 in favor of upholding an age verification measure targeting adult content platforms on the internet that the state legislature of Texas adopted during the 2023 legislative session. As a quick reminder, the case isFree Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxton and featured the parent companies of the world’s largest adult tube sites suing the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for targeting speech that is otherwise protected.
Mike Masnick already wrote for Techdirt about how the SCOTUS justices “threw out the First Amendment” to shield their eyes from seeing nudity on the internet. It’s bad news, to say the least. But what many in the discourse on the far-right will overlook or try to misinterpret is that this ruling is going to have negative impacts on so much more than just the pornography space.
When considering the true “winners” in the immediate aftermath of this ruling, age verification software providers are a visible class of beneficiaries. A trade group called the Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) serves as the unified industry voice for companies that develop and market age assurance and identity verification software products. Member companies of the trade group include the likes of Yoti, Privo, Envoc, Experian, and AgeChecked.com. Yoti is one of the world’s foremost providers of age assurance technology, while Envoc is a Louisiana firm that developed the first white-label age verification measure used to require identity to access a website like the Aylo-owned property Pornhub within the statewide digital space. AVPA has a membership of around 30 companies, with many of the major players in the industry outside of the United States. For example, companies Yoti and Ondato are based in the United Kingdom.
I do not care about where these companies come from or if they have a trade group. The adult entertainment industry has the Los Angeles-based Free Speech Coalition, with members of the trade group based internationally. Aylo is in Montreal. xHamster’s parent company is in Cyprus.
I do care when the legal and regulatory environment artificially creates a market that could be in a valuation at billions of dollars due to the regulatory regime and asymmetric retaliation by a few powerful groups that operate in a minority over the wider population. With this high court ruling, the age verification providers are being handed the keys to a market that members of an industry that isn’t even similar in nature must rely on as legally mandated vendors. Though age assurance laws in the United States are a patchwork across the states with no national harmonization, trends in lawmaking and policymaking from around the world – especially in Republican-held states like Texas and in Western Europe and Australia – suggest the age verification laws are not going away.
And it will be a clear benefit for the aforementioned companies. According to AVPA data related to revenue published in 2021, the valuation projections for all member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that implement age verification laws and regulations will equate to GBP 9.8 billion within 10 to 15 years. Conversion to U.S. dollars is a sum of nearly $13.4 billion at today’s conversion rates. The OECD countries number 37, with the United States a founding member. No direct calculation has been made as to how much revenue will be generated by the forced adoption of these vendors by adult entertainment industry firms.
But it is expected to be hefty, considering that pornography remains one of the most searched for categories of content on the internet. To further complicate matters, countries like Australia and the United Kingdom have sweeping national laws governing age verification for virtually every website on the internet, including pornography. Australia is even preparing to require age checks for search engine providers like Google and Microsoft. In the United States, around 20 of the 50 U.S. states have some form of age assurance requirement to access pornography. Aylo, one of the most visible adult entertainment industry companies, has blocked users in all 20 of those states.
The most recent round of blocks occurred on July 1, 2025, with all Aylo-owned platforms being blocked in Georgia, South Dakota, and Wyoming. In my reporting for AVN on this development, a spokesperson for Aylo told me they blocked the following states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming. That is a total population of 136.9 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Vintage 2024 data. The same data estimates the national population to be 340.1 million. 203.2 million citizens are in jurisdictions without age assurance regulations and, therefore, aren’t (yet) blocked by Aylo’s websites.
About 40 percent of the U.S. population lives under these laws, meaning that four in 10 people do not have access to websites like Pornhub, RedTube, Brazzers, Men.com, or other Aylo sites. A consumer can simply download a VPN to circumvent the age gates, ultimately rendering such laws useless. However, this won’t stop AVPA’s companies from exploiting adult industry firms.
All of this said, I wish to also remind you that age verification technology is still total dogshit. Though this tech has advanced significantly in the past few years, the studies on efficacy and deployability outside the United States and Australia still conflict with promotional material published by AVPA’s member firms.
For example, the Australian government’s Age Assurance Technology Trial (AATT) found that age verification can be “effective,” but accuracy has much to be desired. A test conducted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation found “key flaws” in facial scanning technology meant to confirm age verification. In the news outlet’s test, they found that AI-augmented age assurance scans of a 16-year-old student’s face misidentified him as 19, 23, 26, and 37 years old. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has found some of the software for age assurance to be highly effective, but it still fails significantly in differentiating between adults’ and minors’ ages. The Open Technology Institute at the think tank New America also found age verification tech to not be up to snuff, despite the claims of accuracy and effectiveness. In the NIST tests, Yoti was found to be the most accurate age-estimation software with an average error of 1 year in age. Most software made age estimation mistakes by 3.1 years on average.
Commenting in The Conversation about the AATT findings, an information sciences professor, Lisa M. Given of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, explained, “We are going to see a messy situation emerging immediately where people will have what they call false positives, false negatives.” This is consistent with other concerns for privacy rights violations and data loss.
Is all of this worth $13 billion for companies that a vast majority of people have never heard of? I think not.
Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.
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