>>1268686"Sitting at a café in downtown Ottawa last week, Friedman said his company shares concerns about minors accessing Pornhub, one of the largest porn sites on the internet.
"We want no children on our platform whatsoever."
Not only is that from a moral standpoint, he says, but also a commercial one.
In 2023, his firm acquired ownership of Pornhub's parent company as it was reeling from reports that exploded in late 2020 about the site being home to countless examples of child sexual abuse material and other images and videos uploaded without an individual's consent.
The reports led payment companies such as Visa and Mastercard to pull their services from the site.
Pornhub scrubbed millions of unverified videos from its platform and put in new safety protocols.
Similar laws requiring internet porn sites to verify a user's age have been passed in several U.S states, including Louisiana. After it required that a government ID be used to access Pornhub, traffic took a nosedive.
After Utah passed a bill that Friedman said did not include an option to use a government ID, Pornhub blocked access to the state's residents altogether.
Friedman argued such laws will not achieve the desired effect of shielding children from sexually graphic material, but will only push them to even darker corners of the internet to sites that may not comply with the law.
What the company is pushing for instead is for the onus to be put on manufacturers of devices being used to access sites, rather than on the sites themselves.
"We will never ever take the private identifying information of our users," he said.
"(We) will always comply with the law," he said.
"That's either by imposing the solution, not operating … or in addition to all those, challenging these in law, if we think that they violate some higher legal principal like the Constitution."
So far, Liberal MPs have been the only ones to vote against the proposed law."
(Cont.)
