Aylo

The provision, which took effect in May, said users physically located in Utah still count as Utah visitors even if a VPN makes them appear to be elsewhere.

Pornhub parent company, Aylo, sued, arguing websites cannot reliably determine the true location of VPN users, the fucking point of a VPN, and could therefore be forced to age verify users worldwide.

US-

Yeah

Um, Fabian Tillman managed to borrow a lot of money and buy up a lot of these companies.

And that, that became, uh, that became what was called Manwin then, it became MindGeek and today it's known as Alo.

And this is the company that owns Pornhub and, and, you know, all these sort of other tube sites.

How

Yeah, it's so straightforward for her.

Well, let's talk about the business of selling your image online.

So one of the things that you talk about in the book is that Manwin, which was the digital holding company that owned Pornhub, which then turned into MindGeek, which then turned into Alo.

Yes, it's a bit complicated.

Turning to other news, a federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction blocking Utah from enforcing its new age verification law targeting adult content websites.

Now, US District Judge David Barlow ruled yesterday in favor of Aylo Free Sites, which is the owner of Pornhub.

Now, Aylo had argued that the law imposed unreasonable burdens by requiring sites to verify users' actual locations, even when individuals use virtual private networks to appear outside the state.

Now, Barlow agreed that Aylo is likely to succeed on the merits, stating that the statute's vague language essentially creates strict liability for operators attempting to determine user locations.

Now, the company had argued that the lawsuit threatened civil and criminal penalties while infringing on the rights of users outside of Utah.

Now, the ruling prevents enforcement while the lawsuit proceeds toward trial.

Hello and welcome to Control Alt Speech, the podcast where we make sense of the major debates shaping online speech, platform power, content moderation, and the future of the internet.

It's September 24th, 2026, and this week we're making sense of the New York noise about AI regulation, highlighting three ways that internet users are embarking on governance, and for our extended Patreon episode, what recent stories about Discord and ALO say about the state of age assurance right now.

Control Alt Speech is the highly effective age-appropriate musings... of Mike Masnick, founder and editor of Tector, and me, Ben Whitelaw, founder and editor of Everything in Moderation.

I think most of what we say is 18 plus.

If you enjoy the podcast, rate and review wherever you get your podcasts, become a Patreon supporter to get this next segment.

And we'll jump into that now.

It's all about Discord's age assurance rollout and how Ofcom is going after ALO, the owner of the largest porn site in the world, Pornhub, and what that means for the future of the internet.

If your organization is interested in sponsoring the podcast, contact us via our website at controlaltspeech.com.

And a lot of people got like pushed to the sidelines.

And actually I remember it was Mind Geek at the time, ALO now, like paid very close attention to that.

And we're very concerned about that.

And they went and they, interviewed a bunch of agents and a bunch of models about like all of their directors and who were, you know, were any of them inappropriate or any way.

Because ILO was the only company that I could dig up, basically, that actively contributes to the ecosystem.

And ALO, of course, as I said, drives companies such as MindGeek, and MindGeek is behind Pornhub and other companies in that space.

Yeah,

interesting.

We're winning right now.

We're gutting the MindGeek and the Pornhub industry because of lawsuits that we have with survivors.

So we're having a go at it every different angle.

At NCOSI, we understand that you've got to go upstream.