It has the vibe of a corporate company doing post hoc justification for a decision they already made.
And then the commenter provides a parallel to how willing they were to put money into Google+, i.e. they appear willing to put money into a relatively low usage product when they feel like doing it.
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).
> The explicit tube site Pornhub is now blocked in 25 U.S. states
I had assumed that the states were blocking Pornhub but reading between the lines in the linked article it does imply it's not the states are not applying technical blocks.
The states have applied intentionally onerous requirements onto these sites with full knowledge that would most likely not comply making them de facto blocks. You wouldn't be fooled if a gangster said "that's some nice kneecaps you got there, it would be a shame if something happened to them" so I don't know why we are acting so naive about Texas and co.
They want them to stop letting kids in their state have access to their porn. It's up to Pornhub how to implement that and Pornhub decided to block all of Texas.
This seems like a reasonable ask and a reasonable response to me, so I don't understand who the bad guy is supposed to be here.
By default cookies are sent for cross-origin requests. The SameSite cookie flag that lets sites control this was only shipped in Safari the year before this blog post was written so it would have been hard to depend on it yet.
