I believe it was PornHub that said, after France demanded the site do age verification on its side, that it should be on the part of Internet service providers to do the age verification thing rather than individual sites. We’re seeing it a lot across the board, not just in Europe, but Texas has a similar thing about explicit material being age-gated by the site and requiring verification on the site-side or outright bans. I know this is a novel idea, but maybe just be a parent. There are parental controls on basically all devices. If you want to block a site, you can block it.

Sadly, the next one to be hit by these regressive laws in the UK and EU is Nexus Mods. As announced Tuesday, the site that’s known for putting breasts on everything and making normal women look like blowup anime sex dolls is about to require EU and UK residents to provide verification, so you can put breasts and large penises all over Baldur’s Gate 3 and Fallout New Vegas.

To a degree, I get it on several things. The post announcing this future update to the site notes, “We’re updating our Terms of Service to include a clearer, more detailed definition of what counts as illegal content under UK law and how we protect children from harm whilst on the site. While this kind of content was already not allowed on the site, we’re tightening the language to be absolutely clear. All users will be notified when the Terms of Service are updated.

We’re also introducing automated detection for Child Sexual Abuse Material. Any content of this nature will be immediately removed, and the user responsible will be banned and reported to the National Crime Agency.” That I can’t complain about without being put on the same pedestal as Andrew Tate or other questionable figures. What does bother me, however, is the line just a bit before “Remove adult content for all UK and EU-based users.”

I’m not disagreeing with the idea of keeping kids from explicit material; unsurprisingly, I’m all for that. However, between VPNs and otherwise, things like this doesn’t change anything – Once PornHub switched off its servers for France, sales of VPNs reportedly went up. More Nanny-state laws like this, putting the onus on sites like Nexus Mods, are just going to push people towards using a VPN to skirt the laws.

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