Today is going to be filled with steamy hot-takes on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. I've spent 20 years with that thing, it's boring to go into, attempts to "fix" it would all make it worse. Bor-ring.
Let's talk about 18 U.S. Code § 2257 instead!
Let's talk about 18 U.S. Code § 2257 instead!
Here's the relevant laws: law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18…, law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18…, and the zinger: law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/28/pa…
These laws were all passed in a huge decency scare of the 1990s. Ostensibly just for protection against exploitation of minors, in fact they're really overreaching in every direction. An Ashcroft-supported bill meant to make it too expensive/difficult to produce pornography.
It didn't work.
First, it tried to make it REALLY HARD to run a business by requiring documentation for all your performers, AND, ALSO, require that documentation to be available whenever the government wanted, during "normal business hours" (8am-5pm), and for at least 20 hours any week.
You can read all the requirements here: law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/28/75… - the idea being that sleazy porn producers couldn't possibly maintain such record accessibility and the other expectations for AG inspection, and they'd all close up and we'd all just watch Matlock reruns.
I'll give you a second to figure out what happened next.
What happened next was that an entire business rose up of companies that were just heaps of file cabinets and storage with all the release and documentation information (which was required to be held for seven years), which was open all required hours, and it all went there.
In other words, they just consolidated the entire onerous accounting to a central firm, a situation that has occurred since the beginning of business, and it happened pretty quickly.
The law set is a real example of "let's try and regulate human behavior in such a way that only a tiny sliver of it will be even fiscally possible to do, and in that way we will STAMP IT OUT", but that never quite works out. Now there's these massive paragraphs you see: 
SESTA/FOSTA was another attempt to deal with this, and it's had pretty intense knock-on effects since it went into law. I won't take up your time with tweets about it, there's plenty out there.
In conclusion, laws are a tool that cuts both ways, regulating human behavior is a minefield, and messing with the initial poorly-clumped-together lobbyist-and-legislation messes is often a case of making it even worse.
