What the Supreme Court's decision on porn age verification means for Indiana
Indiana lawmakers in 2024 approved a measure requiring porn website operators to enact age verification processes, and allowing parents to sue if their children get past them, following the example of several other states. Several of those operators and free-speech advocates immediately sued the state over this law, as they did in other states, but the Indiana lawsuit has been in a holding pattern pending this Supreme Court decision.
The competing interests in all of these lawsuits are First Amendment rights to free speech and expression balanced against minors' exposure to sexually explicit material. In Indiana as in Texas, the plaintiffs argue these age restriction measures are overly burdensome and restrict free speech unnecessarily while placing privacy at risk.
More: Supreme Court upholds Texas' age verification law for porn sites
For example, they argue there are more effective options out there to address the same end without introducing a barrier to adults' access, such as content filtering at the browser or device level.
Defenders like Attorney General Todd Rokita have said protecting children from "harmful" content overrides these concerns.
The Supreme Court voted along ideological lines in arguing that Texas' law is not overly burdensome, saying it uses "established methods of providing government-issued identification and sharing transactional data."
Indiana's law is similar: Acceptable age verification methods include a mobile identification credential issued by the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, an independent third-party age verification service, or "any commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data."
From 2024: Porn website operators sue Indiana AG Todd Rokita to block age verification law
After Pornhub and others sued Indiana in June, a federal judge granted their request to block the law, but then an appeals court rescinded that injunction in August, allowing the law to go into effect. Meanwhile, Pornhub has disabled access to its website for people surfing the web within Indiana.
The plaintiffs later requested to pause the proceedings in Indiana until the Supreme Court made a decision on the Texas law, which a judge granted, acknowledging that the question of what standard to apply to these free speech concerns is similar in both cases, and the Supreme Court's answer may help streamline the discovery process in Indiana.
According to a November filing in the case, the parties will reconvene within two weeks.
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