In some years, it’s hard to single out one news story as they year’s biggest. Not so in 2025, where the clear winner is the arrival of age verification requirements imposed on the online sector of the adult entertainment industry.
Back in the early 2000’s, about five years into my time working in the online adult entertainment space, there was a flurry of “Age Verification System” (AVS) sites launched. The “age verification” performed by such sites amounted to requiring the user to enter their credit card information before being shown explicit imagery.
While AVS sites certainly did more to prevent minors from accessing online porn than free sites that blithely displayed their explicit wares to all comers, there was no true verification of the age of the user being performed; any minor who could get his or her hands on an adult’s credit card had what they needed to circumvent the system – let alone the minors who had their own credit cards.
The AVS model, which was quite popular for a time, was largely derailed by the credit card companies themselves. They didn’t like the suggestion that their cards could be used as age verification vehicles, nor did they want in any way to be associated with “legitimizing” the adult industry, even if they were happy to happy to profit from the fees they charged to adult merchants for accepting credit card transactions.
Among many of us who launched and operated adult sites in the 1990s, there was a belief that at some point, age verification would come to the online adult sector in some real fashion, most likely one imposed by governments. After all, it only made sense that if one couldn’t sell porn to minors in a brick-and-mortar storefront, that same prohibition would eventually make its way to the online space.
I’m not sure any of us thought it would take this long, but as it happened, 2025 is the year age verification got real in the U.S. market. We were right that it would be government-imposed, although I suspect a lot of us believed it would be the federal government and not a disparate slate of U.S. state and foreign governments that set the table.
Of course, it wasn’t for lack of trying that the federal government failed to impose age-verification. Previous attempts had all run afoul of the courts, as the judicial branch found those attempts to be overly broad, overly burdensome and both over and under-inclusive with respect to the content to which they applied.
All that changed this year with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. Not only did the ruling uphold the Texas law at issue in the case, the decision also represented the court lowering the bar in terms of the standard of review applied.
In the majority decision penned by Justice Clarence Thomas, Thomas reasoned that the law “simply requires adults to verify their age before they can access speech that is obscene to children.”
“It is therefore subject only to intermediate scrutiny, which it readily survives,” Thomas wrote. “The statute advances the State’s important interest in shielding children from sexually explicit content. And, it is appropriately tailored because it permits users to verify their ages through the established methods of providing government-issued identification and sharing transactional data. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is affirmed.”
If you read just Thomas’ opinion, you might come away thinking there was nothing remotely controversial in declaring that intermediate scrutiny was the correct standard to apply in the case. If you also read Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent, however, you’d find there was plenty to dispute in Thomas’s characterization of the case.
“Cases raising that question have reached this Court on no fewer than four prior occasions – and we have given the same answer, consistent with general free speech principles, each and every time,” Kagan wrote. “Under those principles, we apply strict scrutiny, a highly rigorous but not fatal form of constitutional review, to laws regulating protected speech based on its content. And laws like H. B. 1181 fit that description: They impede adults from viewing a class of speech protected for them (even though not for children) and defined by its content. So, when we have confronted those laws before, we have always asked the strict scrutiny question: Is the law the least restrictive means of achieving a compelling state interest? There is no reason to change course.”
Kagan also asserted there’s no reason for the Court to subject laws like H.B. 1181 to the lower standard of scrutiny, because if a state truly does its job in narrowly tailoring such laws, the statutes should survive strict scrutiny anyway.
“A law like H. B. 1181 might well pass the strict-scrutiny test, hard as it usually is to do so,” Kagan wrote. “As just noted, everyone agrees that shielding children from exposure to the sexually explicit speech H. B. 1181 targets is a compelling state interest. And Texas might be right in arguing that it has no less restrictive way to achieve that goal: It is difficult, as everyone also agrees, to limit minors’ access to things appearing on the internet. If H. B. 1181 is the best Texas can do – meaning, the means of achieving the State’s objective while restricting adults’ speech rights the least – then the statute should pass First Amendment review.”
At the end of the day, however, Kagan’s dissent doesn’t matter. The majority of the court ruled in favor of Texas – and, absent some very unlikely future reversal on this point, laws like H.B. 1181 will be subjected to intermediate scrutiny and therefor face far better odds of being upheld.
The imposition of age verification requirements on adult websites won’t be the full and final impact of the court’s ruling. But from an adult industry perspective, it will certainly be what 2025 is most remembered for as we look back in the years to come.
Happy New Year, all. Here’s hoping 2026 gives us something better to look back upon than Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, once 2027 has arrived.
