January 16, 2021 12:00 AMLegal
- By
LOS ANGELES—As 2020 came to an end, after a year filled with proposed legislation designed to crack down on adult content online, a bill appeared in the United States Senate that took the most draconian approach to date, when it comes to controlling sexually explicit material online. Titled the “Stop Internet Sexual Exploitation Act,” or SISEA, the proposed law — sponsored on a bipartisan basis by Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkely and Nebraska Republican Ben Sasse — threatened to shut down the whole online adult industry, with its broad language aimed at any “online platform that hosts and makes available to the general public pornographic images.”