Starting Monday, Utah says it will stop taking adult websites at their word. State regulators plan to begin enforcing the age-verification requirements in a law passed earlier this year, and they are promising audits, fines and lawsuits for sites that still let visitors in with nothing more than an “I’m 18” button. According to KSL‘s Bridger Beal-Cvetko, the Utah Department of Commerce has decided that a court ruling blocking one piece of the law still leaves it free to go after companies that don’t properly check users’ ages.

What Utah is enforcing

The law is Senate Bill 73, the Online Age Verification Amendments. As Cache Valley Daily‘s Eric Frandsen reports, the Department of Commerce and its Division of Consumer Protection announced on Friday that enforcement starts Monday, Nov. 2. Commercial websites with substantial amounts of sexually explicit material have to use reasonable methods to confirm visitors are at least 18. Sites and third-party verification services are not allowed to keep identifying information once access has been granted.

SB73 built on an earlier Utah age-verification law and gives the Division of Consumer Protection the power to pursue violators directly. It also creates a new tax on adult websites to help pay for enforcement, with money going to a fund for youth mental health. The Utah State Tax Commission will enforce the tax side.

Violations can cost up to $2,500 each. “Every single violation can be up to $2,500. If you’re looking at thousands of violations? Those add up quickly,” Commerce Commissioner Margaret Woolley Busse told FOX 13 News‘s Ben Winslow. “We can take them to court, we can file injunctive relief.”

The VPN piece is on hold

The most aggressive part of the law is not in effect. It would have held adult sites responsible for users who hide their location with a VPN. On Sept. 24, U.S. District Judge David Barlow issued a preliminary injunction against that provision. KSL reports that the pause came after Aylo, the owner of Pornhub, RedTube and other adult sites, sued the state. Utah’s position is that the injunction doesn’t touch the basic duty to verify ages, so that part is being enforced.

The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Calvin Musselman, R-West Haven, told FOX 13 he is working on a revision to address the judge’s concerns and admitted that blocking VPN use may be out of reach. “That might be the idea, but that might not be achievable. We’ll see as we go forward,” he said.

How the state plans to check

Officials are keeping their methods quiet. The department told KSL it has “implemented specialized computing and auditing infrastructure developed by enterprise technology partners.” Busse would only add, “I don’t want to comment too much on our techniques, but I can say that we are using some advanced technology to be able to assess this.”

Busse told FOX 13 the scans will focus on sites where more than a third of the content is pornographic and that advertise themselves as adult sites. FOX 13 also noted that the law may not reach social media platforms, even though adult content often shows up there. She told KSL the law requires sites to verify ages, not identities, that the verification data has to be deleted right away, and that the state collects none of it. She also said the goal isn’t revenue: “We’re not looking to go and issue a lot of fines. We’re looking to make sure they are doing it.”

The industry’s response

Aylo told KSL that Pornhub has complied with Utah’s original law since it took effect in 2023. “We are glad to see the state of Utah will finally enforce its law after 3.5 years, but this changes nothing about our operations,” the company said. FOX 13 reports that Pornhub and RedTube block Utah IP addresses in protest, showing visitors a message that urges them to contact lawmakers. Aylo says the “best solution” is “performing age verification at the source: on the device.”

The Free Speech Coalition, a trade group for the adult industry, has told its member sites to follow the parts of the law that are still standing, policy director Mike Stabile told FOX 13. He argued that the current approach drives viewers toward worse corners of the internet. “Less than 5% of people are willing to go through that process, right? People don’t want to scan their face and put in an ID to access content that might be controversial or that they might want private,” Stabile said. “What we’ve seen over the past couple of years, it’s just this huge shift in traffic away from legitimate, reputable sites to pirate sites, to sites outside the U.S. that are not…age verifying, but they’re also maybe not taking down revenge porn.”

Musselman said he is open to hearing the coalition’s input as he rewrites the law. FOX 13 also pointed out that the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld age-verification laws in other states, which gives Utah more footing to enforce its own.

The takeaway

For adult creators, the important part of this story isn’t the fine. It’s where the audience goes. If Stabile is right that most people won’t scan an ID and will drift to pirate and offshore sites instead, creators who earn through legitimate, rule-following platforms lose traffic to sites that also tend to host stolen content. Utah adds a tax and active audits to the usual verification rule, and the reports don’t say which subscription platforms its scans will cover. Creators with fans in Utah should keep an eye on Monday’s enforcement and on Musselman’s rewrite, since other states tend to copy laws like this.

Photo: Utah State Capitol by Yuya Sekiguchi via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0