VPN company reports a massive rise in VPN demand on 1st of January 2025 when a new Florida censorship law requiring age/ID verification for access to porn came into force. VPN-pushing vpnMentor documented a rather incredible 1150% spike in Floridians
wanting to use a VPN to hide their location. The major porn website Pornhub decided to self ban access from any IP address based in Florida. So even those viewers willing to stupidly hand over ID data to a porn site would be blocked, leaving a VPN as
the main way of continuing to access Pornhub.
A vpnMentor spokesperson explained to the tech news site The Register:
To measure the impact of VPN demand the research team compiles data from a variety of sources.
The team uses internal tools to assess changes in terms of search volume, web traffic, and clicks related to VPN services in general. We work with different metrics which we analyze, and we evaluate the searches or impressions that transform into
downloads.
In March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the Online Protection for Minors act, aka House Bill 3 , into law. The legislation requires websites to verify visitors' ages, and for those hosting a substantial portion of
material harmful to minors, such as Pornhub, to block access to anyone under 18 in an effort to prevent kids and teens from peeping on any pornographic videos. HB3 allows fines of up to $50,000 for websites that don't comply with the regulations.
And so in response, Pornhub's parent company Aylo decided to yank the site from Florida users as it had already done in other states with similar laws, including Kentucky, Indiana, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas, North Carolina, Montana,
Mississippi, Virginia, Arkansas, and Utah. Pornhub explained:
Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide, including Florida, have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous.
Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy. Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless
properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws.
