A misguided bill that would have required many people to show ID to get online has died without getting a floor vote in the California legislature, where key deadlines for bill passage passed this weekend. Thank you to our supporters for helping us to kill this wrongheaded bill, especially those of you who took the time to reach out to your legislators.
EFF opposed this bill from the start. Bills that allow politicians to define what is “sexually explicit” content and then enact punishments for those who engage with it are inherently censorship bills—and they never stop with minors.
A.B. 3080 would have required an age verification system, most likely a scanned uploaded government-issued ID, to be erected for any website that had more than 33% “sexually explicit” content. The proposal did not, and could not have, differentiated between sites that are largely graphic sexual content and a huge array of sites that have some content that is appropriate for minors, along with other content that is geared towards adults. Bills like this are similar to having state prosecutors insist on ID uploads in order to turn on Netflix, regardless of whether the movie you’re seeking is G-rated or R-rated.
Political attempts to use pornography as an excuse to censor and control the internet are now almost 30 years old. These proposals persist despite the fact that applying government overseers to what Americans read and watch is not only unconstitutional, but broadly unpopular. In Reno v. ACLU, the Supreme Court overruled almost all of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law that was intended to keep “obscene or indecent” material away from minors. In 2004, the Supreme Court again rejected an age-gated internet in ACLU v. Ashcroft, striking down most of a federal law of that era.
The right of adults to read and watch what they want online is settled law. It is also a right that the great majority of Americans want to keep. The age-gating systems that propose to analyze and copy our biometric data, our government IDs, or both, will be a huge privacy setback for Americans of all ages. Electronically uploading and copying IDs is far from the equivalent of an in-person card check. And they won’t be effective at moderating what children see, which can and must be done by individuals and families.
Other states have passed online age-verification bills this year, including a Texas bill that EFF has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to evaluate. Tennessee’s age-verification bill even includes criminal penalties, allowing prosecutors to bring felony charges against anyone who “publishes or distributes”—i.e., links to—sexual material.
California politicians should let this unconstitutional and censorious proposal fade away, and resist the urge to bring it back next year. Californians do not want mandatory internet ID checks, nor are they interested in fines and incarceration for those who fail to use them.
