The idea that a state court in one particular state can enforce such an absurd law against a company that likely has no business operations or servers in the state is ridiculous. I don't care if you like the porn site in question or not, or condone or endorse its content. This is a slippery slope towards every regional tinpot dictator legislature attempting to censor the internet by having an entity's domain name revoked.
.com in particular has also been well proven over the past 5 to 10 years to be vulnerable to federal court orders to seize domains at the registrar level. That's not really anything new. It's a known risk for anyone building a corporate brand/identity around a specific .com domain name. What's new is this is being done from the state court level. (Edit: To be clear, in my opinion, a US State court completely lacks jurisdiction on this matter).
> The idea that a state court in one particular state can enforce such an absurd law against a company that likely has no business operations or servers in the state is ridiculous.
Two things of note regarding this.
First, note the office of origin: Texas Attorney General, which is currently occupied by Ken Paxton who is running for a tightly contested seat in the US Senate.
Second, a state court does not have jurisdiction beyond its borders for entities not operating within same.
> .com in particular has also been well proven over the past 5 to 10 years to be vulnerable to federal court orders to seize domains at the registrar level. ... What's new is this is being done from the state court level.
Which is why any attempt to enforce this ruling would be subject to removal to Federal court.
I worry about it about as much as I worry about getting extradited to Thailand to face court for violating a law insulting the Thai king. I am unaware of even a single person of my nationality who has been extradited to Europe to face some kind of GDPR tribunal.
If I were running a business that had any operations or clients whatsoever in Europe my opinion on this topic would be different (in terms of legal liability to the corporation, and necessity of compliance to ensure ongoing revenue from European customers, etc), but I am not.
The GDPR doesn't try to remove anything from the global internet. You're free to not serve your site in the EU. Texas is free to block sites in Texas. But Texas trying to remove the ability of (for instance) Europeans to access websites is a completely different matter.
> GDPR Article 17 expressly requires the removal of things from the global internet
...as part of compliance with GDPR, if you choose to be compliant. Please name one instance of the EU suing and successfully removing an American website from the internet under this article, or any part of the GDPR? Considering we're talking about an actual case of the US seizing the domain of a European website, whataboutting a hypothetical with the GDPR which has never done the reverse despite being in force for 10 years is incredibly disingenuous.
Why do you think that is necessary for jurisdiction? It's doing business with TX customers every time it serves an ad to someone there. The law governing sufficient contacts for internet companies has been pretty well established since the 2000s.
> It's doing business with TX customers every time it serves an ad to someone there
By this same logic if my web server physically located in Canada, the USA or Iceland serves LGBTQ content to people in Uganda I should be held liable or dragged into a Ugandan court under some of Uganda's anti-LGBTQ laws?
Honest question: what is the ultimate end game if at some point a court in another country orders a domain be reinstated? Do we end up with a domain registration system per country?
I think given the history and "ownership" of the specific TLD of .com by verisign and verisign's relationship with the US federal government, it then proceeds to ignore any court orders to reinstate the ownership issued by a court in any other country that is not the USA.
Default judgement, absolutely meaningless at this point as to how a court would rule against a plaintiff that actually showed up, respected the court’s authority, and defended itself.
Why should a Netherlands based company that publishes content on the internet entirely outside of this state's borders and jurisdiction be required to show up or respect its authority? By this logic if I'm sued in Turkey for publishing content on my web server hosted in California insulting Erdogan, I should have to go show up and defend myself in some kangaroo court.
It would be kind of interesting to start a gay/trans/lgbtq+ website with a .berlin TLD, and bait the texas state attorney for a lawsuit.
Because technically, ownership of a domain of a foreign city in a foreign sovereign country is anticonstitutional in the US since the declaration of independence.
The court case would be quite fun because you could argue with colonialism, exerting foreign control, and draw parallels to the East India Trading company, UK colonies etc.
Maybe this is how we can get rid of the modern day colonialist Donuts, LLC and give cities their gTLDs back?
But does a US State control a TLD, really? Is that even something that's within the legitimate legal power of an individual state? Previous .com seizures have been done at the federal court level. The federal government reserves the authority to regulate all inter-state commerce. The entire history of how the .com TLD is run by Verisign is federal government related.
Doing this at the state court level is as nonsensical as an individual state deciding it doesn't like a law or regulation that's part of the jurisdiction of the FAA or FCC, and wants to do its own unique weird local thing.
So if I don’t do business in Texas, have no operations in Texas or otherwise deal with Texas in any way a state court should just be able to order a company to suspend my whole domain?
I’m Canadian and Texas courts have zero authority over me so they can f*ck off.
But they do have authority over the domain registrar, so you’re vulnerable there no matter where you live.
I don’t agree with the premise of age verification, but of course a prosecutor would go after the assets they can reach if enforcing local laws. They’ve done this for years when it comes to copyright infringement.
It's a huge overreach to say that any individual US state has authority over a domain registrar, and even more specifically over .COM as a TLD, given its history with VeriSign and the US federal government.
There exists a well defined process, precedent and prior case law in US federal court to seize a .COM domain name by a court order issued to VeriSign. Doing this at the state level is entirely new.
> Stuart Lawley, the CEO of ICM Registry--the company behind the XXX top level domains, says XXX sites should help empower parents to keep their kids away from adult content.
Well that's kinda the whole idea of having an "adult content" tld; it's so you can block all .xxx domains instead of having to create a blocklist of sites. Like an opt-in nsfw flag for the internet, basically.
Well the site does not present Texas in a good light. Their .gov site presents me with this. Looks like they need to worry about their own site instead of worrying about out of state sites.
>Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead
> Firefox detected a potential security threat and did not continue to www.texasattorneygeneral.gov. If you visit this site, attackers could try to steal information like your passwords, emails, or credit card details.
So a state (or municipality or anyone capable of making laws) has the ability to say, "You don't meet our local laws, take down your URL" now?
This is going to be a real problem when states start nuking whole parts of the internet from orbit. A state has a law against conversion therapy and starts to remove sites with that? A state has a law against trans people? Or abortion? Or medical misinformation? Suddenly we just start purging sites back and forth?
Battlegrounds end up as torn up, muddy, desolate places. Turning the domain registry into a battleground is a bad idea. Over the long term, no one wins if we choose to fight there.
In the US, if you used a US domain or registrar, this is possible. If you are Dutch and registered a .nl domain with a Dutch registrar, this is not possible.
I mean the US works like this, it isn't suprising a US state also does.
If someone from the US does something illegal on your site (which is legal in your country), depending on how much they want you will end up in a US prison.
Before the US decided that betting online was OK, betting sites had travel advisories for their employees not to travel to the US.
You wrote this in the passive voice; it doesn't say who is doing the blocking.
Pornhub itself is doing the blocking; it uses geolocation and denies services to IP addresses from jurisdictions with age verification laws. The laws are usually not structured so as to require a third party such as an ISP to block noncompliant sites; instead, the governments of the states with those laws can sue the porn sites and their service providers (Verisign in the case of .com domains).
It's not confusing and you should understand what's happening for your own safety. This has been happening for a couple of decades internationally and now with USA states.
This result means that Texas can take various means to block motherless. But more importantly no motherless employees should travel to Texas without risk of arrest. Same for abc/youtube/facebook employess traveling to India.
You should be aware of this and monitor it in your industry.
> obtained a court-ordered writ directing Verisign, the company that maintains the “.com” domain registry, to place the domain “motherless.com” on a registry lock, hold, or similar status.
So they're using the fact that Verisign is a US company and can therefore be leaned on.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. What do other countries do who don't have Verisign to lean on? US companies really don't like being told what to do by governments of other countries, but when the shoe is on the other foot...
But that, more appropriately, only affects internet users in that country (ignoring the cloudflare network blocking that causes various other sites to also be blocked).
This appears to basically wipe the site from the entire internet, for all countries.
When you create the infrastructure, you make the rules. If a party doesn't like those rules, they are free to create their own replacement infrastructure and obtain global buy-in.
ccTLDs already exist and their respective countries have sovereignty over those TLDs: the UK can disappear any .uk domain name it wants from the global internet.
The .com TLD is American, and is therefore subject to American legal proceedings.
That's the correct way, because it applies only to residents of that jurisdiction. Texas should be able to prevent their local ISP's from showing illegal content, but not control what people see in other parts of the country/state.
> The Office of the Attorney General will continue to use every available legal mechanism, including writs of attachment against domain names, to enforce Texas law and ensure that no company, regardless of where it is incorporated, can profit from exposing Texas children to harmful content.
And Kick Online Entertainment S.A. appears to be incorporated in Luxembourg. The "S.A." is a mostly European thing, kind of like a "limited" company.
> I won’t lose any sleep at the loss of such scum but the general principle seems a bit strange.
That's generally key in making a precedent. The first case is someone nobody really cares for, but it's built a precedent where the next case must follow suit.
> In March 2012, the U.S. government declared that it has the right to seize domains ending in .com, .net, .cc, .tv, .name, and .org if the companies administering the domains are based in the U.S. The U.S. government can seize the domains ending in .com, .net, .cc, .tv, and .name by serving a court-order on Verisign, which manages those domains.
So he managed to block the site globally for not forcibly violating the privacy of its users with mandatory age verification.
The US court system really needs to do something about this, and overturn Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton in favour of Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union.
FWIW, the site isn't blocked globally. They just moved to a new domain.
I do generally agree that local governments trying to forcefully exert their influence beyond their jurisdiction is deeply problematic. It wouldn't even be possible to host a website on the internet if this becomes normalized, due to being held to thousands of contradicting standards. At most Texas should have the authority to tell Texas ISPs to block traffic.
It operates in Texas if it is serving Texas users.
> Kick Online, which openly describes itself as a “moral free” company, ignored the lawsuit and refused to comply with the court’s order. It continued publishing and distributing harmful sexual material that was accessible to minors in Texas.
This is the same website with a forum with millions of users trading information on how to assault their partner.
> It operates in Texas if it is serving Texas users.
What do you mean "serves"? Does that just mean not actively blocking users from Texas? Allowing your web site to be accessible regardless of user location is, and always has been, the default way to run a web site. Your assertion would mean that web site operators are beholden to the laws of all jurisdictions on the planet if they don't actively block those users.
Think about what a bad precedent that would be. Some countries criminalize promotion of pro-LGBT+ content. What if those countries suddenly demand extradition of people who run pro-LGBT+ blogs because the web sites are available there?
Also, keep in mind that geolocation isn't actually part of the Internet - it's an overlay that private companies have cobbled together that usually works. But it's not perfect, especially at the subnational level. Many times I've connected to public Wi-Fi and I get an alert that I've signed into something from across the country, because that's where the Wi-Fi provider's IPs are located. Are you sure that every jurisdiction in the world will accept that if gelocation gets it wrong, you're off the hook? Utah has already claimed that companies are responsible for complying with their laws even if the user masks their location with VPN. https://www.privacyguides.org/news/2026/05/11/utah-targets-v...
Does this mean Texas can shutdown other websites in other states that provide abortion support? I’m sure there are those who would argue such to be harmful to children…(not to mention the fetus)
Right, that's why speech by white Christians males should be protected, and not any of those Muslims or gay people.
Now, I say this mockingly, my neighbors (yes I live in Texas) say such things with a steadfast belief. Which is really weird to me because they keep electing adulterers and rapists.
I don't see the disconnect you do - they are voting for white Christian men to protect white Christian men. The rape and adultery was hurting women (or gay guys).
The problem is that Paxton is attempting to do the same thing to every site that doesn't forcibly violate user privacy with mandatory age verification. Its part of Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundations goals, and its incompatible with privacy rights.
There's no such thing as "reasonable age verification measures". Its lie spread by fascists like Ken Paxton, the Heritage Foundation, and ton of other evil people.
Definitely bad overall and opposed to the principle by which this is being done, but I am at least glad it happened to motherless. The last I saw of that site it had terrible moderation and hosted quite a bit of dubious material.
I guess by default all .com's have US jurisdiction? Because even if it's a default judgment, and the registrar is based out of the US, which seems to the case here, any court order from the US is able to take a domain down.
The Ninth Circuit held that the U.S. court had jurisdiction to proceed because VeriSign—the registry for all .com domains—was located in the United States.
Every TLD that is not a ccTLD is effectively a US ccTLD. This has always been the case, and perhaps the US has tricked us into becoming complacent. If the world was fair they would all be underneath .us.
.com in particular has also been well proven over the past 5 to 10 years to be vulnerable to federal court orders to seize domains at the registrar level. That's not really anything new. It's a known risk for anyone building a corporate brand/identity around a specific .com domain name. What's new is this is being done from the state court level. (Edit: To be clear, in my opinion, a US State court completely lacks jurisdiction on this matter).
Two things of note regarding this.
First, note the office of origin: Texas Attorney General, which is currently occupied by Ken Paxton who is running for a tightly contested seat in the US Senate.
Second, a state court does not have jurisdiction beyond its borders for entities not operating within same.
> .com in particular has also been well proven over the past 5 to 10 years to be vulnerable to federal court orders to seize domains at the registrar level. ... What's new is this is being done from the state court level.
Which is why any attempt to enforce this ruling would be subject to removal to Federal court.
If I were running a business that had any operations or clients whatsoever in Europe my opinion on this topic would be different (in terms of legal liability to the corporation, and necessity of compliance to ensure ongoing revenue from European customers, etc), but I am not.
I fail to see the difference in principle from the federal government doing this for copyright violations.
GDPR Article 17 expressly requires the removal of things from the global internet
> You're free to not serve your site in the EU
Geoblocking is functionally impossible
...as part of compliance with GDPR, if you choose to be compliant. Please name one instance of the EU suing and successfully removing an American website from the internet under this article, or any part of the GDPR? Considering we're talking about an actual case of the US seizing the domain of a European website, whataboutting a hypothetical with the GDPR which has never done the reverse despite being in force for 10 years is incredibly disingenuous.
Of course it has business operations in TX. That is the nexus granting jurisdiction.
It does not, as explicitly stated in the court's decision found here[0].
https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...
Hosting out of the netherlands. Kick their owners are globally headquarted in Australia, their US operations are out of SFO, CA.
By this same logic if my web server physically located in Canada, the USA or Iceland serves LGBTQ content to people in Uganda I should be held liable or dragged into a Ugandan court under some of Uganda's anti-LGBTQ laws?
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=uganda+an...
Not sure how this does not violate interstate commerce.
Contact your congress criter: https://www.congress.gov/
BTW: Kick - Melborne, AU. US Operations: SanFran CA. Registar: Verisign - Reston, VA.
Because technically, ownership of a domain of a foreign city in a foreign sovereign country is anticonstitutional in the US since the declaration of independence.
The court case would be quite fun because you could argue with colonialism, exerting foreign control, and draw parallels to the East India Trading company, UK colonies etc.
Maybe this is how we can get rid of the modern day colonialist Donuts, LLC and give cities their gTLDs back?
Or did you mean, like, morally?
Doing this at the state court level is as nonsensical as an individual state deciding it doesn't like a law or regulation that's part of the jurisdiction of the FAA or FCC, and wants to do its own unique weird local thing.
I’m Canadian and Texas courts have zero authority over me so they can f*ck off.
I don’t agree with the premise of age verification, but of course a prosecutor would go after the assets they can reach if enforcing local laws. They’ve done this for years when it comes to copyright infringement.
There exists a well defined process, precedent and prior case law in US federal court to seize a .COM domain name by a court order issued to VeriSign. Doing this at the state level is entirely new.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/08/europe/porn-site-motherless-t...
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/man-behind-xxx-domains-say...
>Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead
> Firefox detected a potential security threat and did not continue to www.texasattorneygeneral.gov. If you visit this site, attackers could try to steal information like your passwords, emails, or credit card details.
This is going to be a real problem when states start nuking whole parts of the internet from orbit. A state has a law against conversion therapy and starts to remove sites with that? A state has a law against trans people? Or abortion? Or medical misinformation? Suddenly we just start purging sites back and forth?
Battlegrounds end up as torn up, muddy, desolate places. Turning the domain registry into a battleground is a bad idea. Over the long term, no one wins if we choose to fight there.
Multiple conservative SCOTUS justices openly admit to taking bribes from parties with cases before them.
But what people do instead is to disable access for people from that specific state.
If someone from the US does something illegal on your site (which is legal in your country), depending on how much they want you will end up in a US prison.
Before the US decided that betting online was OK, betting sites had travel advisories for their employees not to travel to the US.
https://mashable.com/article/pornhub-blocked-states-2025
Pornhub itself is doing the blocking; it uses geolocation and denies services to IP addresses from jurisdictions with age verification laws. The laws are usually not structured so as to require a third party such as an ISP to block noncompliant sites; instead, the governments of the states with those laws can sue the porn sites and their service providers (Verisign in the case of .com domains).
Otherwise the general idea seems absurd that an individual state could freeze a domain impacting for the whole Internet…
(EDIT: I won’t lose any sleep at the loss of such scum but the general principle seems a bit strange.)
This result means that Texas can take various means to block motherless. But more importantly no motherless employees should travel to Texas without risk of arrest. Same for abc/youtube/facebook employess traveling to India.
You should be aware of this and monitor it in your industry.
You know real, friendly, generous humans live in Texas, right?
So they're using the fact that Verisign is a US company and can therefore be leaned on.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. What do other countries do who don't have Verisign to lean on? US companies really don't like being told what to do by governments of other countries, but when the shoe is on the other foot...
They lean on their ISPs, see Spain and the La Liga controversy.
This appears to basically wipe the site from the entire internet, for all countries.
ccTLDs already exist and their respective countries have sovereignty over those TLDs: the UK can disappear any .uk domain name it wants from the global internet.
The .com TLD is American, and is therefore subject to American legal proceedings.
And Kick Online Entertainment S.A. appears to be incorporated in Luxembourg. The "S.A." is a mostly European thing, kind of like a "limited" company.
That's generally key in making a precedent. The first case is someone nobody really cares for, but it's built a precedent where the next case must follow suit.
(Under "Controversies".)
> In March 2012, the U.S. government declared that it has the right to seize domains ending in .com, .net, .cc, .tv, .name, and .org if the companies administering the domains are based in the U.S. The U.S. government can seize the domains ending in .com, .net, .cc, .tv, and .name by serving a court-order on Verisign, which manages those domains.
However, applying this for violations of _state_ law seems odd.
Where does it end?
What if a law enacted by a single US city’s city council is violated? Would US as a country seize the domain?
"Sorry Meta, but BFE, Nebraska outlawed Farmville and now some guy named Bob owns facebook.com."
The US court system really needs to do something about this, and overturn Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton in favour of Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union.
I do generally agree that local governments trying to forcefully exert their influence beyond their jurisdiction is deeply problematic. It wouldn't even be possible to host a website on the internet if this becomes normalized, due to being held to thousands of contradicting standards. At most Texas should have the authority to tell Texas ISPs to block traffic.
Thank you for your virtue signaling. You're now registered as a lifetime GOP member.
> Kick Online, which openly describes itself as a “moral free” company, ignored the lawsuit and refused to comply with the court’s order. It continued publishing and distributing harmful sexual material that was accessible to minors in Texas.
This is the same website with a forum with millions of users trading information on how to assault their partner.
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2026/03/world/expose-rape-as...
FAFO.
What do you mean "serves"? Does that just mean not actively blocking users from Texas? Allowing your web site to be accessible regardless of user location is, and always has been, the default way to run a web site. Your assertion would mean that web site operators are beholden to the laws of all jurisdictions on the planet if they don't actively block those users.
Think about what a bad precedent that would be. Some countries criminalize promotion of pro-LGBT+ content. What if those countries suddenly demand extradition of people who run pro-LGBT+ blogs because the web sites are available there?
Also, keep in mind that geolocation isn't actually part of the Internet - it's an overlay that private companies have cobbled together that usually works. But it's not perfect, especially at the subnational level. Many times I've connected to public Wi-Fi and I get an alert that I've signed into something from across the country, because that's where the Wi-Fi provider's IPs are located. Are you sure that every jurisdiction in the world will accept that if gelocation gets it wrong, you're off the hook? Utah has already claimed that companies are responsible for complying with their laws even if the user masks their location with VPN. https://www.privacyguides.org/news/2026/05/11/utah-targets-v...
I didn't know that Texas is supporting and promoting the North Korean government: http://naenara.com.kp/main/index/en/first
I wonder why they aren't being called out for anti-American terrorist groups.
Does this mean Texas can shutdown other websites in other states that provide abortion support? I’m sure there are those who would argue such to be harmful to children…(not to mention the fetus)
Leftists and trans activists attempting to shut down Kiwifarms comes to mind.
Supreme Court allows Texas to enforce law requiring age verification and parental consent on apps - https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/07/supreme-court-allows-texa... - July 6th, 2026
Supreme Court allows Texas’ law on age-verification for pornography sites - https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/06/court-allows-texas-law-on... - June 27th, 2025
https://mashable.com/article/all-the-states-and-countries-wi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...
Now, I say this mockingly, my neighbors (yes I live in Texas) say such things with a steadfast belief. Which is really weird to me because they keep electing adulterers and rapists.
Then it's violating the laws of a whole lot of places by serving pornography to adults.
The existence of a web server doesn't feel like enough nexus to seize a domain.
Nonsense.
There is no reliable way to not serve your content to people in Texas. If anything, Texas should compel ISPs to not serve it to their Texas customers.
This is exactly how we lose all our rights.
Found the case, https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/07...
The Ninth Circuit held that the U.S. court had jurisdiction to proceed because VeriSign—the registry for all .com domains—was located in the United States.