(The Center Square) – Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill is rejecting Pornhub’s call to reconsider the state’s age-verification law, saying her office intends to increase scrutiny of the company instead.
“Not only will we not reconsider age verification for Pornhub’s website, but we’re going to pursue even more accountability,” Murrill said in a statement.
She did not elaborate on what additional accountability could involve.
Pornhub appealed to Murrill, Gov. Jeff Landry and Rep. Laurie Schlegel, the law’s sponsor, in a letter arguing that Louisiana’s website-by-website approach has failed to keep minors away from pornography and instead steered users toward sites that ignore the law.
The company said searches conducted June 4 found that eight of the first 10 results for “free porn” on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo led to websites without age verification — 24 of 30 results across the three search engines.
Pornhub did not identify the websites, provide the underlying search results or fully explain how it determined whether each site complied with Louisiana law, making the claim difficult to independently verify.
Still, the company argues the results expose a weakness in Louisiana’s enforcement model: major platforms can comply or block access in the state while smaller, foreign or anonymous operators remain readily available.
Pornhub called site-level age verification “performative, ineffective and unenforceable” and urged lawmakers to shift responsibility to Apple, Google and Microsoft. Under its proposal, phones and computers would begin with adult content blocked, and users would verify their age once through the device rather than separately on every website.
Apple has adopted a version of that model in the United Kingdom, where web-content restrictions are automatically enabled for children, teenagers and adults who have not confirmed they are at least 18.
Louisiana’s law, which took effect in January 2023, requires websites containing more than one-third material considered harmful to minors to verify that users are adults through a digital identification card or another commercial system. Websites and verification providers are prohibited from retaining identifying information after access is granted.
