LOS ANGELES—By March 25 — Thursday of this week — Utah’s Republican Governor Spencer Cox must either sign or veto a bill passed by the state’s legislature that would require iPhones and other internet-ready devices to come with anti-porn filters installed and already turned on. Cox has not yet announced his decision, but on Friday he may have given an induction of which way he is leaning, saying that the bill sends an “important message” about the need to shield minors from sexually explicit content online.
Even if Cox were to sign the bill, the law would not take effect in Utah until five other states pass a similar law — with a deadline of 2031. If five states fail to pass such porn-blocking laws in the next decade, the Utah law would simply expire without ever having taken effect, according to a report by the tech site The Verge.
“We really want to empower parents,” Cox said at a press conference last week. “If nothing else it sends an important message.”
Cox has previously said only that he would “carefully consider” whether to sign the bill, which was sponsored by Republican state representative Susan Pulsipher. The bill is just the latest shot fired across the bow of the adult industry by Utah’s state government. Last year, the Utah legislature enacted a law that requires adult sites to include a “warning label” before every video streamed or downloaded by users.
Though the earlier law has also been, unsurprisingly, controversial, many adult sites, including the network of “tube” sites owned by Pornhub parent company MindGeek have reportedly complied with the law rather than mount a legal challenge. MindGeek videos now include, in Utah, an “opt-in” message stating that the state considers adult content to be harmful to minors.
But the new, potential porn blocking law appears certain to face Constitutional challenges if it takes effect. The Utah branch of the American Civil Liberties Union has already come out in opposition to the bill, saying that automatically blocking content “infringes upon the general public’s First Amendment rights to freely access the internet.”
Under the bill, users of smartphones and other internet connected devices would be free to turn off the filters. But the automatic blocking of large amounts of online content — much of which is likely to be non-adult, due to the tendency of such “filters” to sweep up a wide range of material — appears unlikely to stand up to a Constitutional challenge.
Utah in 2016 adopted a resolution declaring porn a “public health crisis,” a measure also taken by at least 14 other states.
Under the “porn filter” law, the makers of internet devices would provide a password to each purchaser, enabling the filters to be disabled. But if the filters were not automatically enabled at the time of purchase, the device manufacturer would be held legally liable for each time a minor uses that phone, tablet or computer to access adult material online.
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