The dangers of the modern internet aren't boobs though. The 20th century internet had boobs. The modern dangers are state-funded and international they're not going to be thwarted by an age-verification law, are they?
More of it yes, but the themes and extremes have been shifting over the years as well, with family fantasies and misogyny/sexual violence becoming increasingly prevalent.
This was actually on the front page recently [0], and while I'm no prude, I do think it's worth taking the trends in porn seriously when comparing the old Internet to the current day.
Suppose you have some content that depicts healthy and loving relationships, but is also sexually explicit. The prudes are going to want that inside the porn filter along with the rest of it, even though it's something that does the opposite of what you're concerned about.
Meanwhile, insert "watch it for the plot" joke, because we all know that kind of content gets produced when the goal is to appeal to the prurient interest without allocating a lot of budget to writers. But that's actually the problem. Age gates and things are friction. Suppose you want to create something good that appeals to a mass audience because it's thoughtful, but it's also sexually explicit. As soon as you put it behind the wall you lose the large majority of the audience, not because they're minors but because they're adults not willing to swipe their ID in order to watch "porn", whether out of the assumption that anything with that tag on the gate is inherently immoral or concern that someone else would assume that if anyone found out they were watching it.
And then the wholesome and salutary stuff doesn't get produced. You'll notice that such content is uncommon, because it's effectively banned in most of the places with even moderate production values. You can't put it on broadcast TV, "porn" is banned wholesale on YouTube, corporations the likes of Disney would generally be skittish about producing it etc. You'll occasionally get something like that on HBO or Netflix but even then the incentive to produce it is lower because they wouldn't be able to license it to as many other places.
Which means the main place it gets created is in places like the old Tumblr before the prudes killed it. But killing Tumblr doesn't get rid of porn, it just lowers the quality of it, where "lower quality" is more rather than less misogynistic and insalubrious.
The platforms that are popular today (Pornhub, XHamster etc;) have restrictions on what they will publish, pornhub in particular has cracked down hard on pornography that does not have a chain of custody.
Rape fantasy and domination kinks are more difficult to find than when I was a kid, you don't stumble upon it.
If you are a kid looking for boobs the most likely place you wind up is Pornhub or xhamster too.
The internet when I was a kid was more like efukt except even less moderated.
I don't disagree that porn shapes our sexual behaviour. But I don't think it's a bad thing. Sex is a behaviour that's sensitive to fashion and tradition just like food, dance and social norms are.
If people do more extreme things and they enjoy it then why not? As long as it's fully consensual and of adult age it's only great when people get to explore their sexuality.
Goatse was shock, not porn. Kid sees that, gets mildly traumatized and figures it out later and laughs about it when they're an adult. I'm far more worried about them internalizing mysogyny from mainstream porn; that shit sinks deep.
