Half of America Now Requires Your ID to Browse the Internet

On September 30, 2025, Ohio's age verification law — House Bill 96, the "Innocence Act" — went into effect. It requires any website hosting a "significant" amount of adult content to verify that visitors are over 18 before granting access. The method? Upload your government-issued photo ID or submit to a commercial age verification system.

Ohio isn't alone. Louisiana started this wave in 2023. Texas, Virginia, Utah, Indiana, Montana, Mississippi, Arkansas, North Carolina, Wyoming, and over a dozen more states have followed. Half the country now mandates that you prove your identity before accessing legal content online.

The stated goal is protecting children. The actual result is something very different.

What Actually Happened in Ohio

Here's the part that tells you everything about how well these laws work:

Pornhub — the most visited adult site in the country — didn't comply. It didn't even have to. Ohio's law accidentally classified Pornhub as an "interactive computer service" under federal law, a category that is directly exempt from the state's age verification requirement. Major adult platforms simply ignored the law, stayed online, and kept operating as usual.

Ohio lawmakers noticed. In March 2026, they introduced HB 84 to close the loophole — this time with geofencing requirements and fines up to $100,000 per day for non-compliance. They're also trying to make VPNs less effective by requiring sites to use geolocation technology.

So the law didn't protect a single child. But the infrastructure to collect your identity is being built anyway.

The Identity Database Nobody Asked For

Forget the politics for a second. Look at the mechanics of what these laws require:

1. You visit a website that hosts adult content.
2. The site demands your government-issued photo ID.
3. A third-party verification company processes and stores your identity.
4. That company now has a record linking your real name to the sites you visit.
5. That database becomes a target for hackers, subpoenas, and data brokers.
6. One breach, and your most private browsing history is public record.

This isn't hypothetical. In 2024 and 2025, hackers stole medical, financial, and legal data from hundreds of thousands of Ohioans at both the state and local level. The idea that an age verification database will be more secure than healthcare systems that already failed is wishful thinking.

The Prohibition Effect

Security experts have pointed out the obvious: these laws don't eliminate demand. They redirect it. When Pornhub blocked Texas and other states rather than comply, users didn't stop watching — they moved to less regulated sites, many hosted overseas, with no age verification and no content moderation at all.

The result is the exact opposite of child safety. Mainstream platforms that do moderate content and remove illegal material get replaced by platforms that don't. Children aren't protected. They're exposed to worse content on shadier platforms.

This is prohibition logic applied to the internet. It didn't work with alcohol. It didn't work with drugs. It's not working here.

What Actually Protects Kids

The technology to protect children from inappropriate content already exists. It doesn't require a government database, a third-party verification company, or uploading your driver's license to a website.

This is what GhostPort's Family Shield does. DNS blocking via Pi-hole, IP blocking via nftables, per-device controls through the dashboard. Content gets filtered before it ever reaches the device. No third-party database. No identity collection. No government registry.

Parents control their own network. Kids are actually protected. Adults keep their privacy.

25 States and Counting

The wave isn't slowing down. Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Utah, Ohio, Indiana, Montana, Mississippi, Arkansas, North Carolina, Wyoming, and more than a dozen other states have passed or proposed similar laws. The EFF called 2025 "the year states chose surveillance over safety."

Every one of these laws shares the same fundamental flaw: they assume the only way to protect children is to identify and surveil adults. But the technology to protect kids at the household level — where parents actually have authority — already exists and doesn't require anyone to hand their ID to a website.

The question isn't "how do we verify ages online?" It's "why are we building identity databases when router-level parental controls already solve this?"

The answer is that household-level solutions don't give anyone a database. And that tells you what this is really about.