Starting July 10, those who live in Kentucky will no longer be able to access Pornhub due to new state legislation requiring stringent age verification measures. Users who attempted to visit the site on Thursday were greeted with a pop-up notification that read, “You will lose access to pornhub in 26 days,” beneath an image of the Kentucky state flag.

Earlier this year, Kentucky lawmakers passed a bill mandating that pornography websites verify the age of users to ensure they are over 18. Governor Andy Beshear signed the bill into law, aligning Kentucky with several other states that have enacted similar regulations. The law, set to take effect in mid-July, stipulates that pornographic websites must use a state or federally-issued ID or other transactional data to verify age.

Republican Senator Gex Williams of Verona, a proponent of the bill, expressed approval of some websites opting to exit the state rather than comply with the new requirements. “We hope for this,” he stated after the bill passed the Senate.

The legislation frames pornography as a “public health crisis” with a detrimental influence on children. Currently, Pornhub requires users to affirm they are 18 or older before accessing content, but no additional verification is enforced.

Aylo, Pornhub’s parent company, issued a statement to Kentucky Public Radio expressing support for age verification but disagreement with the methods mandated by the new law.

“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,” Aylo said. The company warned that such requirements could drive users to non-compliant, unsafe sites.

Aylo noted that after complying with a similar law in Louisiana last year, Pornhub’s traffic from that state dropped by approximately 80%. “These people did not stop looking for porn. They just migrated to darker corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age, that don’t follow the law, that don’t take user safety seriously, and that often don’t even moderate content,” the company explained.

The new Kentucky law allows users or their parents to sue websites that fail to comply with the age verification requirements. A child or their parents could sue for $10,000 per incident where a porn website does not perform age verification. Additionally, websites must not retain personal identifying data, and violations could result in $1,000 fines for each day the data is stored.

Websites distributing content deemed “harmful to minors” in more than one-third of their material fall under this requirement. Since 2022, similar legislation has passed in over a dozen states, including Indiana, Florida, and Idaho.

Aylo advocates for device-based age verification, which would shift the responsibility to operating systems rather than individual websites. “This means users would only get verified once, through their operating system, not on each age-restricted site,” Aylo stated. They argue this approach reduces privacy and data theft risks while simplifying regulatory enforcement.

As the July 10 deadline approaches, many in Kentucky will find themselves unable to access one of the internet’s most visited adult sites, a change that highlights the growing legislative push to regulate online pornography and its accessibility to minors.