Pornhub Texas Return Possible After High Court Age Check Ruling

Pornhub is considering whether to resume operations in Texas after the porn industry lost a Supreme Court challenge over the state’s age-verification requirements last month, its lawyer said in court Thursday.

The porn giant left in March 2024 rather than establish an age-check system as required or rack up fines for non-compliance.

“Everyone’s reevaluating the new landscape after the Supreme Court opinion,” Scott Cole of Reichman Jorgensen Lehman & Feldberg LLP said.

Pornhub is expected to decide soon whether it’ll return to Texas and finally implement age verification standards, Cole said outside of a courtroom in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas.

By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court on June 27 said the law is a legitimate effort to protect children, rejecting arguments that it violates adults’ speech rights by requiring them to submit identification online.

Later that day, a Texas state court judge unfroze a $1.6 million lawsuit Texas brought against Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo Global, for not implementing age verification after the law took effect in 2023.

In the federal challenge, a coalition of porn sites said Thursday they’ll move forward in pursuing non-First Amendment claims that weren’t resolved by the Supreme Court. Among them: violations for excessive fines, and due process for failing to provide fair notice of what is prohibited.

Senior US District Judge David Ezra encouraged the parties to move slowly, saying he doesn’t want to see any dispositive motions until a year from now.

Ezra sharply criticized the verification law, saying that although he agrees with its purpose of protecting minors, users he insists can get around it by accessing sites through a virtual private network.

“It just isn’t doing anything effectively,” he said.

The case is Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v Paxton, W.D. Tex., No. 1:23-cv-00917, 7/17/25.