Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-ken-paxton-secures-landmark-legal-victory-lock-pornographic-website-domain-and

by letmevoteplease • 5 days ago

200 293 5 days ago

texasattorneygeneral.gov

BobbyTables23• 5 days ago

I don’t understand - was this site or company based in Texas?

Otherwise the general idea seems absurd that an individual state could freeze a domain impacting for the whole Internet…

(EDIT: I won’t lose any sleep at the loss of such scum but the general principle seems a bit strange.)

jagged-chisel• 5 days ago

I think it remains to be seen whether Verisign follows through.

jerrythegerbil• 5 days ago

https://dnschecker.org/#A/motherless.com

toomuchtodo5• 5 days ago

It operates in Texas if it is serving Texas users.

Kick Online, which openly describes itself as a “moral free” company, ignored the lawsuit and refused to comply with the court’s order. It continued publishing and distributing harmful sexual material that was accessible to minors in Texas.

This is the same website with a forum with millions of users trading information on how to assault their partner.

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2026/03/world/expose-rape-as...

FAFO.

pixl972• 5 days ago

All fun and games till religions get in battles and shut down websites talking about gods and beliefs they don't like.

EmbarrassedHelp3• 5 days ago

The problem is that Paxton is attempting to do the same thing to every site that doesn't forcibly violate user privacy with mandatory age verification. Its part of Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundations goals, and its incompatible with privacy rights.

Dylan168074• 5 days ago

It operates in Texas if it is serving Texas users.

Then it's violating the laws of a whole lot of places by serving pornography to adults.

The existence of a web server doesn't feel like enough nexus to seize a domain.

what3• 5 days ago

it operates in Texas if it is serving Texas users

Nonsense.

There is no reliable way to not serve your content to people in Texas. If anything, Texas should compel ISPs to not serve it to their Texas customers.

monksy7• 5 days ago

Today I learned that a foreign government operates in Texas.

I didn't know that Texas is supporting and promoting the North Korean government: http://naenara.com.kp/main/index/en/first

I wonder why they aren't being called out for anti-American terrorist groups.

profmonocle2• 5 days ago

It operates in Texas if it is serving Texas users.

What do you mean "serves"? Does that just mean not actively blocking users from Texas? Allowing your web site to be accessible regardless of user location is, and always has been, the default way to run a web site. Your assertion would mean that web site operators are beholden to the laws of all jurisdictions on the planet if they don't actively block those users.

Think about what a bad precedent that would be. Some countries criminalize promotion of pro-LGBT+ content. What if those countries suddenly demand extradition of people who run pro-LGBT+ blogs because the web sites are available there?

Also, keep in mind that geolocation isn't actually part of the Internet - it's an overlay that private companies have cobbled together that usually works. But it's not perfect, especially at the subnational level. Many times I've connected to public Wi-Fi and I get an alert that I've signed into something from across the country, because that's where the Wi-Fi provider's IPs are located. Are you sure that every jurisdiction in the world will accept that if gelocation gets it wrong, you're off the hook? Utah has already claimed that companies are responsible for complying with their laws even if the user masks their location with VPN. https://www.privacyguides.org/news/2026/05/11/utah-targets-v...

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 5 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisign

(Under "Controversies".)

In March 2012, the U.S. government declared that it has the right to seize domains ending in .com, .net, .cc, .tv, .name, and .org if the companies administering the domains are based in the U.S. The U.S. government can seize the domains ending in .com, .net, .cc, .tv, and .name by serving a court-order on Verisign, which manages those domains.

what3• 5 days ago

Texas isn’t the US government?

BobbyTables23• 5 days ago

Perhaps for violations of _federal_ law…

However, applying this for violations of _state_ law seems odd.

Where does it end?

What if a law enacted by a single US city’s city council is violated? Would US as a country seize the domain?

Cpoll• 5 days ago

The Office of the Attorney General will continue to use every available legal mechanism, including writs of attachment against domain names, to enforce Texas law and ensure that no company, regardless of where it is incorporated, can profit from exposing Texas children to harmful content.

And Kick Online Entertainment S.A. appears to be incorporated in Luxembourg. The "S.A." is a mostly European thing, kind of like a "limited" company.

BLKNSLVR5• 5 days ago

obtained a court-ordered writ directing Verisign, the company that maintains the “.com” domain registry, to place the domain “motherless.com” on a registry lock, hold, or similar status.

So they're using the fact that Verisign is a US company and can therefore be leaned on.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. What do other countries do who don't have Verisign to lean on? US companies really don't like being told what to do by governments of other countries, but when the shoe is on the other foot...

1515523• 5 days ago

What do other countries do who don't have Verisign to lean on?

They lean on their ISPs, see Spain and the La Liga controversy.

comrade1234• 5 days ago

It's not confusing and you should understand what's happening for your own safety. This has been happening for a couple of decades internationally and now with USA states.

This result means that Texas can take various means to block motherless. But more importantly no motherless employees should travel to Texas without risk of arrest. Same for abc/youtube/facebook employess traveling to India.

You should be aware of this and monitor it in your industry.

TurdF3rguson5• 5 days ago

I would think it only applies to named employees, right?

antonvs3• 5 days ago

Even people with mothers shouldn't travel to Texas.

1515523• 5 days ago

travel to Texas without risk of arrest

This isn't some "non-extradition country without a treaty" scenario - "neener neener, if I don't step foot in your area you can't touch me." The United States does still have a functioning Constitution.

If Texas wants to arrest an employee of these organizations, they can simply issue a Texan arrest warrant and other States will be compelled to enforce it.

tailscaler2026• 5 days ago

I won’t lose any sleep at the loss of such scum

Thank you for your virtue signaling. You're now registered as a lifetime GOP member.

WhyNotHugo• 5 days ago

I won’t lose any sleep at the loss of such scum but the general principle seems a bit strange.

That's generally key in making a precedent. The first case is someone nobody really cares for, but it's built a precedent where the next case must follow suit.

throwaway81523• 5 days ago

The domain name is motherless.com if that's what you wanted to know. It's a porn site.

zzril• 5 days ago

More interesting would be the IP!

regecks• 5 days ago

You don't need it, they've migrated to motherless.xxx.

monksy7• 5 days ago

https://ipinfo.io/185.107.81.233

Waterluvian• 5 days ago

I recognize the unusual name. They were also off recently due to a Dutch issue

https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/08/europe/porn-site-motherless-t...

ofewfewhw• 5 days ago

Definitely bad overall and opposed to the principle by which this is being done, but I am at least glad it happened to motherless. The last I saw of that site it had terrible moderation and hosted quite a bit of dubious material.

paxys• 5 days ago

So it's bad but you're okay with it because it's being done to someone you don't like..

This is exactly how we lose all our rights.

rblatz• 5 days ago

Default judgement, absolutely meaningless at this point as to how a court would rule against a plaintiff that actually showed up, respected the court’s authority, and defended itself.

trhway• 5 days ago

That is the strategy - you start with the easy cases - somebody who wouldn’t or couldn’t defend themselves and who is “bad” in public perception.

walrus0129• 5 days ago

Why should a Netherlands based company that publishes content on the internet entirely outside of this state's borders and jurisdiction be required to show up or respect its authority? By this logic if I'm sued in Turkey for publishing content on my web server hosted in California insulting Erdogan, I should have to go show up and defend myself in some kangaroo court.

fwip3• 5 days ago

If you want to keep the domain name you got from a TLD that they control, yes.

Or did you mean, like, morally?

throwatdem123112• 5 days ago

So if I don’t do business in Texas, have no operations in Texas or otherwise deal with Texas in any way a state court should just be able to order a company to suspend my whole domain?

I’m Canadian and Texas courts have zero authority over me so they can f*ck off.

jzb• 5 days ago

But they do have authority over the domain registrar, so you’re vulnerable there no matter where you live.

I don’t agree with the premise of age verification, but of course a prosecutor would go after the assets they can reach if enforcing local laws. They’ve done this for years when it comes to copyright infringement.

EmbarrassedHelp3• 5 days ago

There's no such thing as "reasonable age verification measures". Its lie spread by fascists like Ken Paxton, the Heritage Foundation, and ton of other evil people.

tamimio• 5 days ago

So, what’s the safest domain tld that’s safe from all that craziness out there?

shitter• 5 days ago

.onion

timbit42• 4 days ago

What about .i2p?

inigyou39• 5 days ago

Your local country, provided that it is not crazy. Then you are only accountable to one country's jurisdiction.

linzhangrun• 5 days ago

Hard to say. .cn is of course always strictly regulated: every website needs to be reviewed and registered with the police, and open its data to them. But we can also see that .uk from the supposedly "free west" is moving closer to this.

DenisM• 5 days ago

Register two domains in different jurisdictions, with neither serving its own jurisdiction, and a redirect for stray users.

msftgreed• 5 days ago

So a state (or municipality or anyone capable of making laws) has the ability to say, "You don't meet our local laws, take down your URL" now?

This is going to be a real problem when states start nuking whole parts of the internet from orbit. A state has a law against conversion therapy and starts to remove sites with that? A state has a law against trans people? Or abortion? Or medical misinformation? Suddenly we just start purging sites back and forth?

Battlegrounds end up as torn up, muddy, desolate places. Turning the domain registry into a battleground is a bad idea. Over the long term, no one wins if we choose to fight there.

ranguna• 5 days ago

I thought this was always the case?

But what people do instead is to disable access for people from that specific state.

TurdF3rguson5• 5 days ago

It seems like it's pretty easy to comply. Pornhub and others don't have any problems complying with TX.

abraham2• 5 days ago

According to this pornhub is blocked in 25 states including Texas.

https://mashable.com/article/pornhub-blocked-states-2025

kobalsky• 5 days ago

I mean the US works like this, it isn't suprising a US state also does.

If someone from the US does something illegal on your site (which is legal in your country), depending on how much they want you will end up in a US prison.

Before the US decided that betting online was OK, betting sites had travel advisories for their employees not to travel to the US.

inigyou39• 5 days ago

In the US, if you used a US domain or registrar, this is possible. If you are Dutch and registered a .nl domain with a Dutch registrar, this is not possible.

gamblor9562• 5 days ago

This is a pretty clear violation of the First Amendment, but the current SCOTUS doesn't care about the Constitution.

Multiple conservative SCOTUS justices openly admit to taking bribes from parties with cases before them.

inigyou39• 5 days ago

I believe the current precedent is that porn is not speech.

Hnrobert42• 5 days ago

No. If a site doesn't want to comply with the state, they can geoblock. That's what pornhub does.

charcircuit• 5 days ago

I wonder when browsers will follow Brave's lead and support decentralized domains that can't be censored due to laws from half way across the world.

walrus0129• 5 days ago

The idea that a state court in one particular state can enforce such an absurd law against a company that likely has no business operations or servers in the state is ridiculous. I don't care if you like the porn site in question or not, or condone or endorse its content. This is a slippery slope towards every regional tinpot dictator legislature attempting to censor the internet by having an entity's domain name revoked.

.com in particular has also been well proven over the past 5 to 10 years to be vulnerable to federal court orders to seize domains at the registrar level. That's not really anything new. It's a known risk for anyone building a corporate brand/identity around a specific .com domain name. What's new is this is being done from the state court level. (Edit: To be clear, in my opinion, a US State court completely lacks jurisdiction on this matter).

bmelton4• 5 days ago

How do you feel about GDPR?

walrus0129• 5 days ago

I worry about it about as much as I worry about getting extradited to Thailand to face court for violating a law insulting the Thai king. I am unaware of even a single person of my nationality who has been extradited to Europe to face some kind of GDPR tribunal.

If I were running a business that had any operations or clients whatsoever in Europe my opinion on this topic would be different (in terms of legal liability to the corporation, and necessity of compliance to ensure ongoing revenue from European customers, etc), but I am not.

applfanboysbgon5• 5 days ago

The GDPR doesn't try to remove anything from the global internet. You're free to not serve your site in the EU. Texas is free to block sites in Texas. But Texas trying to remove the ability of Europeans to access European websites is a completely different matter.

AdieuToLogic2• 5 days ago

The idea that a state court in one particular state can enforce such an absurd law against a company that likely has no business operations or servers in the state is ridiculous.

Two things of note regarding this.

First, note the office of origin: Texas Attorney General, which is currently occupied by Ken Paxton who is running for a tightly contested seat in the US Senate.

Second, a state court does not have jurisdiction beyond its borders for entities not operating within same.

.com in particular has also been well proven over the past 5 to 10 years to be vulnerable to federal court orders to seize domains at the registrar level. ... What's new is this is being done from the state court level.

Which is why any attempt to enforce this ruling would be subject to removal to Federal court.

rootsudo• 5 days ago

And third, there was a default judgement.

I wonder what was the value of the domain on the open market, its quite a famous domain and probably had high lead generation..

But I agree with the parent comment.

This is so much state overstepping bounds and irony aside, so much for independence and rights by a state that proclaims personal agency comes first.

1515523• 4 days ago

Second, a state court does not have jurisdiction beyond its borders for entities not operating within same.

Where did you come by this information?

Article IV, Section I

Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State.

thegrim33• 5 days ago

So, you feel the same about stuff like the GDPR then, right?

walrus0129• 5 days ago

Answered below in same thread.

dabluecaboose2• 5 days ago

The idea that a state court in one particular state can enforce such an absurd law against a company that likely has no business operations or servers in the state is ridiculous.

I agree. California has been doing this since 2022 [1][2] and it's equally indefensible.

States should not be allowed to wield their size and influence as a cudgel against other states and jurisdictions.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

[2] https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/ghost-gun-crackdown-a...

walrus0129• 5 days ago

Interestingly if you browse American-hosted online internet firearms accessories websites (and FFLs who will sell you something online to ship to your local FFL), for the most part, it's just a basic HTML popup of "Are you over 18? Click Yes, okay, proceed". I haven't seen a single one that actually attempts to implement age verification. It seems that the Internet-based vendors, the same general cohort of companies that are exhibitors or attendees at the annual SHOT trade show, are not very scared of the Californian AG yet.

I'm unaware of the Californians attempting to seize anyone's domain name over this issue. But indeed this also seems like an overreach, California doesn't get to regulate what an Internet gun accessory store in Idaho advertises or publishes on the Internet. State to state transfers of serialized items go through a well defined federal government regulated process, such as if a person in Nebraska buys a Zastava M70 online from a dealer in Montana.

crossroadsguy2• 5 days ago

One of the reasons I keep my .in domain up and running as my backup email (and just for personal use). That .com domain, if taken down/away from other jurisdictions (the ones that can easily do it) for whatever reason (including a “mistake” or slip) would mean it’s gone for good (because I neither have the capacity nor resources to appeal/fight that in foreign lands).

walrus0129• 5 days ago

Your .IN domain is probably one of the worst possible choices of all ccTLD to claim that you can publish things on it without fear of reprisals or censorship, be assured that something bad would happen to it or you personally if you happened to run afoul of any powerful people in the Indian government (or oligarchs).

Something like .NL (you do not need to be a Dutch national to register) or .IS would be much more legally resilient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India

jayd162• 2 days ago

So like, California voters can just pass a proposition to force the suspension of a dozen conservative domains, for example? Or even better, Rhode Island could?

nadermx• 5 days ago

I guess by default all .com's have US jurisdiction? Because even if it's a default judgment, and the registrar is based out of the US, which seems to the case here, any court order from the US is able to take a domain down.

Found the case, https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/07...

The Ninth Circuit held that the U.S. court had jurisdiction to proceed because VeriSign—the registry for all .com domains—was located in the United States.

inigyou39• 5 days ago

Every TLD that is not a ccTLD is effectively a US ccTLD. This has always been the case, and perhaps the US has tricked us into becoming complacent. If the world was fair they would all be underneath .us.

I want to see other countries start rejecting the ICANN root and forcing all the US domains under .us, but it will never happen. It would break their vhosts for one thing. Doing it at the browser level could avoid that.

Scaled• 5 days ago

I vaguely recall some crypto project that was 'blockchain for domain names'. I scoffed at it at the time, but maybe there is a real need for something like that after all. (Or some other system for domain names you truly own and can't be rugpulled.)

monksy7• 5 days ago

This kills their operations in other states that do not have this.

Not sure how this does not violate interstate commerce.

Contact your congress criter: https://www.congress.gov/

BTW: Kick - Melborne, AU. US Operations: SanFran CA. Registar: Verisign - Reston, VA.

missingcolours• 5 days ago

Common complaint is that government enforcement of laws is insufficient, i.e. fines are only x% of their worldwide revenue. Sounds like this way has teeth and might force companies to actually obey the law?

8note4• 5 days ago

it doesnt have teeth if its unconstitutional

otherwise they could just send the texas rangers to canada to go kill the execs in montreal

wolpoli• 5 days ago

Honest question: what is the ultimate end game if at some point a court in another country orders a domain be reinstated? Do we end up with a domain registration system per country?

walrus0129• 5 days ago

I think given the history and "ownership" of the specific TLD of .com by verisign and verisign's relationship with the US federal government, it then proceeds to ignore any court orders to reinstate the ownership issued by a court in any other country that is not the USA.

fc417fc8026• 5 days ago

Presumably that would depend entirely on the extent to which verisign has any business dealings in the country in question. The more assets that could be seized or customers lost the more likely they are to comply.

inigyou39• 5 days ago

We literally already have one of those. Each country has a .XX TLD, and all other TLDs are for the USA.

fragmede2• 4 days ago

Even .horse?

belorn2• 4 days ago

ICANN policy is very different for country code TLD and generic TLD. Every country (with minor exceptions) decide over their own TLD and thus decide whatever rules they want. It is explicitly a hands off approach in their management of the TLD's.

Generic TLD are different. ICANN dictate to different degree each generic TLD, and is also the one that give accreditation to registrars. ICANN has given different companies the role of operating and handling databases and registration systems, like Verisign with .com, but it is still ICANN that dictate policy. ICANN could decide tomorrow that Verisign is no longer suitable to run the operation of generic TLD's and thus move it to a company located in a different country.

Moving the operations of generic domains to a less US-centric location is not a new idea, same with the legal locations of the organizations that are ICANN and IANA. As I understand it, they are mostly located in USA as a matter of history.

inigyou39• 5 days ago

The winner of that battle will be wherever the DNS is hosted. Which is the USA. Even several ccTLDs are hosted in the USA and must obey USA law above the law of that country.

dlenski2• 5 days ago

Which ones?

belorn2• 4 days ago

The ultimate end game if too many countries would pull at the unified single root that is the domain name system and ip address space, would be a split root. Different countries would resolve .com to different places, and packages going to one server will be going to an other, and people on one side will not be able to communicate with people on the other side since packages would no longer be globally routeable.

In concept, IANA and the group of global stakeholders could move the whole thing to a different country if US becomes too much trouble.

jmclnx2• 5 days ago

Well the site does not present Texas in a good light. Their .gov site presents me with this. Looks like they need to worry about their own site instead of worrying about out of state sites.

Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead
Firefox detected a potential security threat and did not continue to www.texasattorneygeneral.gov. If you visit this site, attackers could try to steal information like your passwords, emails, or credit card details.

mjmas• 5 days ago

Perhaps you could take it up with your ISP or whoever is doing mitm?

harshreality2• 5 days ago

It's being served by cloudflare and gets A+ from ssllabs. Maybe there's something going on with your network or your browser's TLS support.

inigyou39• 4 days ago

served by cloudflare

Maybe that's the security threat. Cloudflare MITMs all traffic.

Bender2• 4 days ago

If you add this [1] function to your shell and do

    fp www.texasattorneygeneral.gov

What do you see? Do you get the same fingerprint? I get:

    Testing via IPv4:
    texasattorneygeneral.gov.
    104.18.152.79
    104.18.94.91
    sha1 Fingerprint=D7:6B:D1:D8:58:5B:16:4A:0B:D8:41:5F:FF:4E:DA:2F:FA:90:4F:4D
    sha256 Fingerprint=94:4F:66:36:A5:AA:AF:17:3A:FD:9C:B6:F0:79:95:17:62:1C:8A:B8:B3:44:61:DD:61:BB:C1:26:C6:77:4F:0F
    notBefore=Jul  4 12:45:24 2026 GMT
    notAfter=Oct  2 13:45:15 2026 GMT

    Testing via IPv6:
    texasattorneygeneral.gov.
    # ( no IPv6 here )

Are you by chance somehow going to the APEX of the domain? The cert is only signed for www, not alt names.

[1] https://nochan.net/b/Text-Crap/function_fingerprint.sh

jmclnx2• 4 days ago

This is what I get:

    Testing via IPv4:
    SHA1 Fingerprint=A3:27:99:AA:0A:21:D8:11:B1:86:6E:CC:3A:12:CA:EC:2E:ED:F6:DA
    SHA256 Fingerprint=0B:77:CB:2F:80:87:98:6B:A8:C3:75:E7:4B:BF:04:4E:C5:5A:CD:00:7A:78:E9:FD:32:2A:72:24:4D:B1:79:EF
    notBefore=Jul 17 03:19:04 2026 GMT
    notAfter=Oct 15 03:19:03 2026 GMT

    Testing via IPv6:

But the distro I am using is still on openssl v2, patched with recent updates

kazinator• 5 days ago

So basically this whole thing is a ploy to get rid of porn: basically, censorship that vaguely tries not to look like censorship.

1. Instigate a completely impractical, rights-violating scheme for age verification that nobody in their right mind wants to implement.

2. Then, enforce it against whatever porn sites land in your jurisdiction at all, knowing that they, like everyone else, don't do the verification.

Am I close?

Suppose the porn site tries to implement it. How many people are going to hand over their personal info to a shady porn site? Most visitors are there anonymously for whatever free stuff they can watch.

Either way, the porn site is ... screwed. Implement age verification: 99% visitors now back-button out and find another porn site. Don't implement it: blocked or shut down.

behringer• 5 days ago

The sooner the US loses control over the internet the better.

ButlerianJihad• 5 days ago

Just for clarity's sake, what is "the Internet", and how does "the United States" have "control" over it?

https://youtu.be/iDbyYGrswtg?si=AL91MHC5q5yg2jnA

inigyou39• 5 days ago

The USA controls ICANN and IANA, who together control the DNS root, as well as controlling all so-called "generic" TLDs through ICANN. Only some country TLDs are actually outside of US jurisdiction, as many of the delegate to USA-based registry providers. ICANN/IANA still control whether or not those countries even get to have domains, so the USA could decide that if the Netherlands wouldn't block motherless-dot-nl then .nl shall no longer exist.

DNS being centralised in the USA was potentially problematic when they weren't abusing their power. Now that they are actually abusing their power, it is actually problematic.

rocketpastsix• 5 days ago

you say this as you type it on an American-run website.

jml7c5• 5 days ago

They're not arguing for American-run websites to not exist.

nvme0n1p1• 5 days ago

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

NeutralWanted• 5 days ago

Maybe another county should have developed, built out, and opened up the Internet themselves then?

earth-tattoo• 5 days ago

So, stage set to ban GrapheneOS website internationally?

etchalon• 5 days ago

Oh look, Ken Paxton is bragging about accomplishing nothing.

tzs3• 5 days ago

I took a quick look at the Texas law. Like a few other such laws it allows sites to use an external service to do the check, as long as the service uses a "commercially reasonable" method of doing that. That basically means it has to be based on government ID or by inference based on certain types of transaction records they can get access to (e.g., if you have a mortgage they can reasonably infer you are an adult).

As far as I can tell it would be possible to build an age verification service based on an open source ZKP implementation such as Google's Longfellow [1] that would be acceptable to these laws, but would allow anonymous age verification. It would be similar to the system the EU is now trialing, except not limited to iOS and to Android devices with Google Play. Longfellow should be able to work with those but also most modern smart phones running any OS the supports the phone's secure element, and also desktop computers that have secure elements, and devices like YubiKeys.

You would have to verify your age with the age verification service to set things. The easiest way to make it so that is not a privacy risk is for the age verification service to be offered by some entity that already has your ID documents. In the EU that would be the governments themselves, but I don't think any US state governments are ready to do that.

The age verification service doesn't necessarily need to store copies of whatever ID you present. It just needs to know you are when it issues its ID documents that get bound to your device's secure element. If this service was offered by some entity that has a widespread physical presence (a bank would be perfect) you could go in, show ID in person, and get your device enrolled.

Even better would be for a trusted non-profit to run this, like the EFF or the ACLU. Yes, I know they don't want age verification to happen at all, but they are going to lose that one, and it would be prudent to try to make it so that people have a privacy preserving way to do it that can be used anonymously when that happens.

Anyway, once your device is set up verifying your age to a website would involve a protocol between your device in the website the uses a ZKP (Zero Knowledge Proof) to demonstrate to the website that the identify information the age verification service bound to the secure element on the your devices says your age is acceptable. The ZKP doesn't disclose anything else from your identidy information. (The web server sees your IP address of course, but they would see that without age verification too). Note that the age verification service has no idea when, or were, you age verify at a website.

[1] https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk

walrus0129• 5 days ago

Even better would be for a trusted non-profit to run this, like the EFF or the ACLU.

You're seriously proposing that organizations along the same general lines as the EFF or ACLU would be okay with being the implementing partner of a "papers, please" identify verification regime? I highly doubt their leadership would entertain the idea for even the briefest moment.

tzs3• 5 days ago

I'm proposing that organizations like that recognize that age verification is going to happen, and try to ensure that when that happens there will be at lease some age verification services that do it in a way that doesn't subject you to a "papers, please" situation every time you go to a website that has to check age.

It can be done with either 0 or 1 "papers, please" events per device rather than 1 per website or worse 1 per website visit, and without preventing anonymous access, but most of the laws do not require that it be done that. Most age verification services will do the minimum required, which usually will mean they are more intrusive and more leaky.

The best way they could ensure that, if they can't convince governments to write the age verification laws to require it, would be to operate such a service themselves.

dlenski2• 5 days ago

Even ignoring the political aspects, like the fact that EFF/ACLU don't want to be in this business (as you note)…

This system will likely fail in the same way that almost every new DRM system has failed: someone will implement the "secure element" badly and its keys or secrets will get exfiltrated and cloned.

It's one thing to keep a cryptosystem secure when its users appreciate that system (e.g. hard disk encryption or TOTP 2FA)… but it's very hard to keep cryptosystems secure when millions or billions of people are unwilling and resentful users having those systems imposed on them.

NDlurker• 5 days ago

Isn't motherless a European website? What the ffff?

Update: yeah https://opencorporates.com/companies/nl/30159632

rurban2• 5 days ago

A big blow to the Texas hosting industry. Some of the world's largest hosting sites are in Texas. They'll likely move out to more liberal states.

1515523• 4 days ago

Are those states somehow exempt from the United States Constitution's requirement to uphold "judicial Proceedings of every other State?"

rurban2• 4 days ago

Texas? They'll rather call for the military to protect their "freedoms" (of calling arbitrary court decisions).

walrus0129• 4 days ago

Do you actually think that an elected state attorney general in Washington or California or New York would shut down a hosting company that, for example, hosts the website of a medical office that ships abortion medication to Texas? That they would send the WSP to a colo in Tukwila near Seattle to pull the plugs on the servers? I highly doubt it.

If the Texans don't like something in another state and want to attempt to shut it down, they can bring an action in federal court.

iamnothere• 4 days ago

If you publish controversial material, better start embracing onion backup domains now. Most people don’t know how to use them yet, but I get the feeling there will be a turning point soon.

xtiansimon• 3 days ago

Reminds me of the recent Supreme Court case limiting the use of nationwide (or "universal") injunctions. Trump v. CASA, Inc. (decided June 27, 2025).

Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law

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