AUSTIN, Texas — A district court judge in Texas has unfrozen the state’s $1.6 million lawsuit against Aylo for allegedly failing to comply with age verification requirements, Bloomberg Law is reporting.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the suit in February 2024, claiming that Pornhub and other Aylo sites were in violation of Texas’ law mandating that adult websites verify users’ ages.
Paxton filed similar suits against the parent companies of Chaturbate and xHamster. Chaturbate settled with the state of Texas in April 2024. The xHamster suit remains open.
As XBIZ reported at the time, the law originally also required sites to post unscientific health warnings about the negative effects of exposure to pornography. The United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit struck down that requirement but upheld the law’s age verification provisions.
This led Aylo to block access to Pornhub and its other sites in Texas, as it has done in numerous states with similar laws.
In July 2024, a Texas district court judge granted Aylo’s request to pause proceedings in the case, pending the outcome of FSC v. Paxton, the Free Speech Coalition’s challenge to Texas’ age verification law. However, the U.S. Supreme Court last month ruled in favor of Texas in that pivotal case, declaring the Texas law — and by extension, similar state age verification laws around the country — constitutional.
According to the Bloomberg Law report, an attorney representing Aylo said that the company would soon decide whether to implement age verification in Texas or continue blocking its sites.
“Everyone’s reevaluating the new landscape after the Supreme Court opinion,” said the attorney, Scott Cole of Reichman Jorgensen Lehman & Feldberg.