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I'm confused, if VPN use soured for that very reason, wouldn't traffic remain roughly the same?
Read the article to find the answer to your question.
The article mentions this. They only mention a 77% drop in visits from the UK, but VPNs have seen increased use. So most likely people in the UK are using VPNs to view porn (however, they don't mention other countries numbers being up or down).
Additionally, they call out that most likely people are also going to sites not following the law. This has always been a big issue with these laws, in that they push people to more extreme/unregulated sites rather than actually curbing the behavior (which is a problematic goal in the first place).
I've been worried about that since all these fools started talking about "banning porn."
The sites that already broke the law (by hosting illegal content) were never going to comply with age-verification laws. If the more ethical porn options are law-abiding, then these laws create a feedback loop - sites that comply suffer from reduced traffic, while sites that ignore the laws become more popular.
I have zero doubt that, right now, there are people wandering onto truly harmful and disturbing material that they never would have discovered if they hadn't been pushed to explore the fringes of the internet in search of porn.
Among the younger folks, I expect most just turned to Discord or Telegram to get their porn fix. Those that don't want to bother with messaging groups probably just went to page 3+ of their search result. I wonder whether duckduckgo's "safesearch:off" is working for brits
Search engines aren't affected by the law so yeah safe search being off still works
Yeah, I think that's a safe assumption. While discord and telegram aren't inherently bad, I think they carry more risks than just going to some site like pornhub.
Some people use VPNs. Most won't bother. You wouldn't need many new VPN users to have a big percentage increase.