If You Really Wanted to Ban Porn, Here's What It Would Take
Prohibition never works, and internet smut is no exception.
PETER SUDERMAN | 2.12.2018 4:05 PM
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Yet even if such a ban worked (in the narrow sense of reducing the porn viewership), you would, inevitably, also leave a thriving black market—on private websites, in hush-hush DVD-distribution networks, in windowless basement studios, and countless other forums designed to avoid the attention of the porn police.
As porn moved underground, the production would almost certainly become less safe for performers working in illegal operations; those performers would also be at risk of legal punishment. The product itself, meanwhile, would likely skew more towards fringe and perhaps even dangerous tastes, as conventional viewers with conventional tastes existed the market. Without any legal distinctions, it's not too hard to imagine a greater interest in, or least acceptance of, child pornography amongst the more risk-seeking porn consumers who remained
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Law enforcement, if it took prohibition seriously, would end up spending a considerable share of its available time and resources cracking down on illegal porn makers and consumers, many of whom, in the age of ubiquitous high-quality camera phones, would be the same people. For prohibition to be effective, authorities would need new powers to surveil and arrest, as well as new oversight over popular technologies, and countless other new ways to intrude on the private lives of citizens.
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A porn ban, then, is a prohibition that might not work on its own terms, and would in any case leave us with a world in which porn is darker and more dangerous for everyone involved. The real barrier to banning pornography, the objection that matters, is not cultural defeatism or lack of public will. It is that attempting to ban porn would at best be a foolish, expensive, and futile project, and at worst a path to a new and radically expanded police state devoted to punishing people for engaging in acts of consensual self-expression. A federal war on porn would be just as winnable as the federal wars on drugs and alcohol—in other words, not winnable at all.
Lots more at the link:
https://reason.com/2018/02/12/ban-porn-prohibition-wont-work/
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