INDIANAPOLIS—The parent company of Pornhub.com, Aylo Holdings, filed a motion to dismiss a state lawsuit filed in December by the office of Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, according to court documents. The motion to dismiss was filed on Monday of this week.
The current status of the lawsuit is that the judge has granted an extension on the filing deadline. Rokita, a conservative Republican, sued Aylo and its subsidiaries, alleging that the company violated the state's age-verification law by failing to block traffic from users using virtual private networks (VPNs) and proxies.
Attorneys representing Aylo's network of sites and subsidiaries note in the court documents that Rokita alleges the "use of technological subterfuge."
"Investigators used a virtual private network ... to mask their Indiana location and falsely appear to be accessing the websites in Illinois—a state without an age verification law—thereby circumventing the very geoblocking measures that the website operators implemented to comply with the AVL (age verification law)," the motion reads.
The plaintiffs alleged Aylo broke the law by not implementing "any reasonable form of age verification." This claim derives from the above investigative efforts of AG's office, which used a VPN spoofing an IP address from Chicago.
Pornhub.com and its network blocked all Indiana IP addresses across its digital space to comply with the state's age-verification law. The legal brief explains, "Indiana lacks jurisdiction over Aylo Freesites because it geoblocked IP addresses associated with the state in order to avoid doing business in the jurisdiction."
"Indiana’s AVL does not require website operators to implement measures capable of defeating VPNs or other user-deployed circumvention tools—it only requires 'reasonable' age verification," the motion adds. "Geoblocking based on IP addresses is a widely recognized, industry-standard method of geographic access control used by major streaming and content platforms worldwide."
As AVN reported, Rokita is blaming the existence of VPNs for providing a direct pipeline for minors to access content that would otherwise be blocked under Indiana's AV regulations. And that fact is core to Aylo's argument for the motion to dismiss.
"Plaintiff fails to make individual allegations establishing personal jurisdiction for many of the named defendants, relying instead on the alter ego theory," the suit reads.
Other arguments made by Aylo's attorneys allege that age-verification laws violate the U.S. Constitution and the Commerce Clause. Under the Commerce Clause, Congress has the constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce and to restrict states from impairing it.
In the initial filing made by the attorney general's office, Rokita also references a highly disputed and unreliable "undercover news reporting" by the far-right influencer Arden Young of Sound Investigations.
Young and the Sound Investigations, an outfit spun off from the hard-right Project Veritas group, went viral in the fall of 2023 for getting current and former employees of Aylo, formerly known as MindGeek, on camera making remarks about their employer, often from positions of being misinformed or uninformed.
