Thats pretty much my read as well - they want their traffic back but dont want the responsibility when inevitably children (and adults) find workarounds to these verification blocks
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I think part of the challenge from the adult industry is that they have a much harder time fighting this in the court of public opinion than in the case of the social media ban for minors or the other pretenses for age verification. If people will barely call their representatives to push back against age verification in the case of social media, who is going to show up to defend NSFW content.
If you think youâre going to lose and this age verification necessity will be your new normal, I think it makes a lot of sense to ask the tech companies that make up so much of this infrastructure to make a solution that can do its best to protect the privacy of users while still validating that a user is over a certain age.
Google is already working on a version of this with a âzero knowledge proofâ that could be used for age verification. Thankfully it seems to have been open sourced. I think our best base scenario should we have to have age verification is a system like we have with TOTP authenticators where a local app can scan an ID, keep a version of the information that canât be reverse engineered that validates age based on the ID, and then gives a simple yes or no to services which require age verification.
Google working on this means itâs in a much better spot than it would be if it was almost any other company, as we have seen with all of the services that have cropped up to serve the age verification needs legally brought on by recent laws. Google and Apple can make something better, even from our perspective, than what the industry can make. Not to mention that it could be more normalized as well so that it is not as much a question why someone may have this system enabled.
With all of these considerations, my big problem is that we have now still created age verification infrastructure that can be used for anything else going forward as the laws change or as companies see fit. In accommodating one industry, another âset of railsâ has been set to request more surveillance and control over us. Itâs still a loss to have to consider a system like this, even if we are trying to come up with an implementation that does the least harm.
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Didnât knew PH would be so mindful of peopleâs data.
Will not praise this company directly but itâs a positive initiative at least.
Or maybe there are ill intentions besides asking for such hardware verification? 
Its too expensive for them and not feasible. Thatâs why. It always comes down to money.
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Not sure such a company struggles when it comes down to money.
But that sounds like a realistic reason for sure.
Saw a few comments above that mention that one yes!
Considering how much free adult content is out there even when not accounting for piracy, yeah, they struggle or âstruggleâ - depending on how you want to look at it (or at-least theyâd like you to believe they do. Even I donât know for sure).