Moderated by Larry Walters of Weston, Garrou, DeWitt, & Walters, the panelists included Joan Irvine of ASACP, Sean Trotter from Adam & Eve, AVN Online's Kathee Brewer, Greg Piccionelli of Piccionelli & Sarno and Clyde DeWitt, of Weston, Garrou, DeWitt, & Walters.
Walters, who provides his clients with a proprietary "birth date verifier" solution to age verification, led off the seminar with an introduction to the issues surrounding the problem of preventing minors from accessing potentially harmful materials. Summing up the importance of having some form of age verification on adult websites, Walters stated that "You need it -- no if's, and's or but's..."
Walters illustrated the differences in attitudes towards age verification on the part of the online and offline segments of the industry; detailing the ways in which traditional adult retail shops have used agents at the point of purchase to perform age verification; for example, a video store owner requesting an ID before selling a DVD to a young-looking customer. Store owners can also limit access to adult materials by placing them behind a counter or covering them with a plain brown wrapper. This level of control is in stark contrast to the online segment of the industry, where transactions do not include a "face to face" encounter where IDs can be examined and where operators have almost universally adopted an attitude of "it's the parent's responsibility to police their children's online activities."
The legal complications and contradictions surrounding age verification were highlighted by DeWitt who remarked that "To the chagrin of parents, minors have a constitutional right to access adult materials." But constitutional rights or not, parents, law enforcement and responsible operators of adult websites have a moral responsibility to prevent such access.
"The industry has a responsibility to take on the issue of age verification," Walters said. "If we don't do it, the government will do it for us."
"Irresponsible marketing practices such as typo-squatting, spam and targeting minors has hurt us in the past," Irvine said, as she described how ASACP's 'best practices' can help website owners to keep children out, become legally safer and promote a more mature vision of the industry to the general public. Irvine went on to say that until the laws governing age verification are solidified, the association recommends that as a minimum, websites should have a disclaimer page with no sexually explicit images on it that says "you have to be 18 to enter" -- steps intended to provide the site with a virtual 'brown paper wrapper.'
"Don't screw around with this unless you want to be wearing an orange jump suit," Trotter advised. "Find out what you can and can't do, and then do it!"
"There is no industry consensus [over age verification]," Brewer warned, however, citing many website operator's belief that since they have the right to distribute legal materials, that parents should bear the ultimate responsibility for supervising their children's online activities. Beyond this philosophical stance is a very real financial consideration: 'warning' pages and other, more intrusive solutions for age verification, lower traffic and sales while raising the cost of doing business. "You can lose 60 percent of your traffic at the age verification page, which is a real concern," Brewer said. She went on to discuss the example of Titan Media which took such a traffic hit when it implemented its age verification solution. Titan's sales, however, were not off by the same percentage as traffic, indicating that many of those that did not want to complete the age verification process were likely gawkers who would have not bought anything and only wasted bandwidth.
Piccionelli had a different take on the issue of age verification, stating that "While it's laudable to protect the kids, we shouldn't be throwing out our constitutional rights to do it." He then explained that since there is no real way to verify a surfer's age, we should turn the issue back on the real criminal -- the intruder who lies to gain access to your website. "It is a criminal act to gain access to a computer beyond your authorization level," Piccionelli said, expounding upon the various state and federal laws governing "hacking" and other forms of unauthorized access. Furthermore, Piccionelli advised that evidence thus obtained in violation of these laws was inadmissible in court.
While Irvine told the audience that a proactive industry response to the issue of age verification would help forestall restrictive legislation and open the door for large mainstream companies to participate in the market, Brewer advised a more grass-roots approach, stating that "Individual webmasters need to take control over their own websites," and do what's necessary to protect their own interests.
A variety of technological solutions to age verification including the Aristotle system used by Adam & Eve were discussed, along with their drawbacks, such as the burden of customers having to provide personal information despite the real threat of identity theft, as well as the increased marketing expenses and costs of age verification, particularly when using so-called "lookup" databases. These databases have a dual financial impact in that smaller companies can't afford the services while foreign competitors don't need to bother, further hurting economics.
"You must have some sort of verification," Piccionelli said. "But if you can't afford a lookup service, then at least have a notice."