Ohio is taking a second shot at forcing adult websites to verify users’ ages, and this time the legislature is trying to close the legal escape route that let adult websites and others walk away from the first attempt.
The Innocence Act, House Bill 84, passed the Ohio House on March 18 and moved to the Senate the following day.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
The bill requires any company that “sells, delivers, furnishes, disseminates, provides, exhibits, or presents any material or performance that is obscene or harmful to juveniles on the internet” to deploy age verification. There are no carve-outs for platforms that host third-party content.
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That shelter is exactly what Aylo, Pornhub’s parent company, claimed under Ohio’s original age verification law.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields platforms from liability for content posted by their users, and Aylo argued that hosting user-generated content made it an “interactive computer service” under that definition, exempting it from Ohio’s age-gating requirements.
The argument worked. The original law’s language mirrored the federal statute closely enough that Aylo and other adult platforms successfully sidestepped enforcement entirely.
HB 84 rewrites those definitions to cut off that route. It also replaces the criminal penalties from an earlier version of the bill, which included misdemeanor charges for minors who bypassed content blocks, with civil fines reaching $100,000 per day for noncompliance.
Enforcement falls to Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, whose office worked with Republican state Reps. Steve Demetriou and Josh Williams on the bill’s drafting.
The measure passed the House Technology and Innovation Committee unanimously before advancing to a floor vote, and a path to Governor Mike DeWine’s signature looks clear.
The age verification these laws require is worth examining directly. To access legal content as an adult, users must submit identity documents, biometric data, or other credentials to platforms or third-party verification services.
That data then exists somewhere, held by someone, subject to breach, subpoena, and uses that weren’t disclosed at the point of collection. The stated goal is to protect children. The actual mechanism is building a database of adults who watch pornography, linked to a verifiable identity.
Demetriou introduced an earlier Innocence Act version that imposed criminal penalties on minors who circumvented age blocks, a provision that treated teenagers as criminals for doing what teenagers do online.
That’s gone from HB 84. What remains is the identity verification infrastructure itself, framed as child protection while functioning as a surveillance requirement for adult content consumption. Ohio isn’t alone in pursuing this, but it is among the states most determined to make it work regardless of the legal obstacles that keep appearing in the way.
