Texas gets court to suspend domain name for age verification - a precedent that should worry you

The Texas Attorney General has suspended a domain for non-compliance with an age verification law. This is not a fine, it's a seizure of the infrastructure - and it opens a door that censorship has been waiting for.

What happened

The office of the Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, announced that it obtained from a court the suspension of a domain name belonging to a pornographic site deemed non-compliant with Texas law HB 1181 (which requires age verification by government ID to access this type of content).

The official statement speaks of a "landmark legal victory" - translate: they are proud. Concretely, the domain was seized at the registrar level, making the site inaccessible via its usual URL.

This is not a fine, it is not an ISP block. It is a domain name seizure by the justice of a State, a mechanism that until now we associated with the fight against industrial counterfeiting or illegal markets (Silk Road, etc.).

Why you should care even if you don't watch porn

Three reasons.

1. The legal precedent. Once a State succeeds in having a domain seized for non-compliance with a local law, the technique is acquired. Nothing prevents another State - or another country - from doing the same for other reasons tomorrow. Dissident info sites, crypto platforms, community forums, you can imagine the rest.

2. The question of jurisdiction. If the site is not hosted in Texas and its operators are not Texan, how can Texas seize the domain? Answer: because the registrar (the company that manages the sale and maintenance of the domain name) is probably based in the United States. An American court has authority over American companies. End of web sovereignty.

3. Age verification, the Pandora's box. Laws of the HB 1181 type are multiplying: more than 20 American states have voted on similar texts since 2023. The United Kingdom (Online Safety Act) and the European Union (via the chat control regulation envisaged) are heading in the same direction. The predictable result: to read a site, you will soon have to scan your ID. For all sites, not just adults.

The real technical problem

Online age verification is impossible to do correctly. Three options exist, none are good:

• Government ID: deposit of identity card photo with a trusted third party → massive risk of data leakage (see Equifax, LastPass, MOVEit leaks)
• Credit card: discriminates against minors, excludes those without a card, does not prove the age of the bearer
• Estimation by AI / facial recognition: documented racial and gender biases, significant margins of error, major privacy violation

The result: either the sites comply and create enormous risks of leaks, or they block access to residents of the concerned State (this is what Pornhub did in Texas and in other States), or they get seized. No option really protects minors - VPNs and non-compliant alternatives proliferate.

What you can do

• Understand the mechanics: the domain is seized at the registrar level. The same site can reappear under another TLD (.xyz, .to, .lu) hosted in a different jurisdiction. The Whac-A-Mole is structural.
• Support EFF and La Quadrature du Net: these organizations do the legal work and document the abuses.
• Use a DNS resolver that protects you: NextDNS, Quad9, Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 (with awareness of their limits).
• Ask the question of sovereign hosting: if you produce online content, don't put all your eggs in the .com US basket.

Our opinion

This specific case (Texas against an adult site) will mobilize little empathy. This is precisely the strategy: win first on the least defensible cases, install the mechanism, then extend it. Nothing new under the surveillance sun.

To test here: DNS.

• NextDNS - nextdns.io (free up to 300k requests/month, granular configuration)
• Quad9 - quad9.net (9.9.9.9, Swiss non-profit, resists political blockages by principle)

Official statement from the Texas Attorney General: texasattorneygeneral.gov