How do you say that as if it is so simple to scan the ID of every person who visits your website. First and foremost is that the US doesn’t even have an actual citizen ID system. It has a patchwork of different government programs which are meant to be different things that it uses for ID. A driver’s license is meant to say whether you can drive, it’s not supposed to be an ID. Secondly, every state has a different driver’s license design, which also doesn’t make any sense. Why doesn’t the US give people a national driver’s license?
Thirdly how is a canadian company supposed to have the technology to scan american drivers license. In real life when you buy alcohol or cigarettes it kind of makes sense because the gas station attendant can like look the id and then the person and then shrug their shoulders. Do you want the website to also scan the face of every visitor to compare it to the ID? How can the website know that the ID is not counterfeit?
Porn websites do not have the technology to scan government IDs for every single visitor. Logistically it is not possible. What would be needed is a third party website operated by each state government that can scan each ID and then signal the verification back to the porn website through API. Each state knows this and they don’t care because their intention is not actually requiring IDs to be scanned, it is to obstruct porn sites from existing. Also since each state is going to individually have to operate their own ID scanning service, that means each state will also be maintaining a gooner database.
In fact, Lousiana was the first state to require porn sites to ID every visitor. You will notice that Louisiana is not colored in red on the map of the OP. That’s because Louisiana provided pornhub with the technology to scan IDs. The other states did not provide pornhub with the necessary ID scanning technology and thats why they got blocked. Louisiana is not blocked.
A government ID is a proprietary information of each state. If someone showed you an ID from Montana would you know what each number and feature on the ID meant? No, you wouldn’t because IDs are a way for the government to ID a citizen and not everything known about an ID is available to the public. In order for a website to be able to scan an ID, the state needs to provide the website with the appropriate software. If you buy alcohol at the grocery store, the grocery store uses state-issued software to scan the ID.
Texas as example passed a law which said that people are now allowed to sue pornhub for not scanning IDs and yet Texas did not give pornhub the necessary software to scan IDs. The intention was purely to manufacture a scenario for people of Texas to sue pornhub.
In the instance of facebook, I’m not sure that facebook actually scans the id, they just store a picture of it. Do you want every porn site to store photos of every ID of every visitor. What if the website gets hacked?