Note that this is not what I said. You overgeneralized it - I will assume without bad intention. The question is if it's illegal to require porn companies to verify the age of their users.
> Can you let us know what your source is?
The Free Speech Coalition and Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson of the Supreme Court, to start. That was their minority opinion in the suit filed against Texas for requiring online porn companies to verify the age of users. The plaintiff argued it was a violation of the first amendment - it is a common argument.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/06/court-allows-texas-law-on...
The argument against the legality of these laws has always been highly suspect. There is a common sentiment that these laws are not good - but when pressed to explain why they aren't legal you get crazy arguments like this, that it violates the first amendment.
The claim made by some is that its illegal to require porn companies to do age verification due to the first amendment. It's really the only legal theory I've seen that supports the claim that the Texas law and others are unconstitutional. The rest just amounts to "it's bad so they should rule against Texas and others."
If his comment was based on some different understanding lets state it so we can clarify, but I think I already have. Of course its not illegal to ask someone's age on the internet. Is that truly what you believed I was saying?
The laws typically don't require them to check ID but instead punish them for selling to minors. You then have several major differences from the online case:
In a physical store where they're neither de facto nor de jure required to check your ID when you're clearly an adult, many of them then don't. There is no feasible way to do the same thing on the internet so instead it effectively becomes requirement to ID everyone, which is different.
In a physical store the clerk can already see your face and hear your voice. It's already hard to be anonymous while interacting in person. A law that compromises anonymity in a context where it was already compromised is different than a law that compromises it in a context where it wasn't.
In a physical store, someone who checks your ID is a human being. They're probably not even going to remember you, are just a store clerk even if they do, and you can see if they try to photocopy your ID or similar and refuse to allow it. Or, you may have a human relationship with that person and trust them not to share your identity with their employer or anyone else. For an online service it's a computer operated by a corporation, and then there is no way for you to tell they're not storing the information, which they have a perverse incentive to do so they can tie all of your future and past interactions with them to your ID. This results in a much stronger chilling effect.
Moreover, a lot of these laws predate the sort of databases that now exist. If someone started making surveillance cameras that could undetectably read the barcode from your government ID if you took it out anywhere in the store and then record it in a database to associate with your activity, your typical defense from that would be to not take it out while you're in the store. At which point a government mandate to show them your ID would have different implications than it did in 1975, which could affect its constitutionality.
1) Not true. The burden is on the seller to verify age. Sure, they can try to do it visually but if they fail they are still liable.
2) Even if true, nothing changes in a legal sense if they lose the ability to informally verify age because thats not a legal right of the consumer. It's just an incidental feature of buying in store which some people value. There may be a difference there, but its not a legal one.
3) Texas law didn't mandate age verification by ID specifically.
That doesn't really have anything to do with the issue that there are practical ways of doing it in person without demanding ID but not online.
Also, those laws tend to have Problems if they actually try to enforce them that way. If the police get a 17 year old a convincing fake ID that says they're 21 or contrive some other circumstance where the seller would reasonably believe they were an adult and then try to prosecute someone for selling to a minor, judges start thinking things like maybe due process doesn't allow the government to get away with that.
> Even if true, nothing changes in a legal sense if they lose the ability to informally verify age because thats not a legal right of the consumer.
"Acquiring information anonymously" is a legal right of the consumer. Laws with chilling effects are a violation of the First Amendment.
> Texas law didn't mandate age verification by ID specifically.
But you're asking why it's different than doing it in person. It's different because the available mechanisms of ascertaining age are different.