There absolutely was damage.

The damage was at a sociological/behavioral level and thus difficult to measure.

> It seems plain old social media is the actual damaging thing to come from the internet.

Ah come on man used by billions it should have killed hundreds of thousands by now if what they say is true about it

Hence why the UK govt wants to ban VPNs and have our own lil internet firewall

I think the point is that porn is decentralized enough rather than the internet too big. Regulating just a handful of sites would deal with like 95% of social media, but you could regulate hundreds of porn sites and have basically 0 effect.

The logical endpoint of this is that nations campaign on "internet sovereignty" and begin whitelisting the internet with strict restrictions and licensure of who can open up new sites. This is reportedly occurring to a limited extent in russia: https://www.intellinews.com/russia-s-mobile-internet-whiteli...

They're going to build an internet where every device must be attested and logged in with your personal state identification.

They're not just stopping filthy, sinful porn. They're making sure wrongthink will be traced to the source and jailed. You can't be allowed to have a job or be banked if you're saying harmful things.

You exist to work and die and be a good little ward of the state. No stepping out of line. You do not get to live as the elites live.

These things are all pretences to track and control “normal” people anyway though. It’s not really about protecting children or about reducing porn access or whatever, it’s about control. It’s less important that the people that really want to do this stuff slip through, the key is to tighten the screws on the population generally. This is why there are apparent inconsistencies, which disappear once you realize what’s actually happening.

Good news, the end goal that is being pushed by corporate lobbyists is still in sight.

Give it a few years (months if you're an optimist?) and you will have to use your Google/Apple hardware device to formally tie your real identity with your digital identity for every site that has even the slim possibility of being a small danger to hypothetical children.

I'm sure Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg will gladly join this effort to reduce harm to children as well, I'm sure that's high on their priority list. They may even already have the infrastructure in place to handle that digital ID, what an amazing coincidence.

Everything will be fine!

Which site would you qualify as a "good" actor?

It's an honest question. Is there such a thing as ethical porn or are there only sites that pay taxes and those that don't?

Along with it organised crime, which gets richer faster and then tends to branch out into other areas. Prohibition in all its forms has caused an enormous cost to people outside of those wanting the now banned things.

The regulation could have been "adult content must be labelled", and then the logic is pushed to the client device.

Like the good actors who ship contaminated food?

What do you think is more likely: they stopped looking at porn or they changed websites?