Looking at it, one effect seems like that any attempt for a platform to comply with the age verification part within the state (as opposed to flat out blocking the state) could be used to try to argue that the state also has enough jurisdiction to try and enforce the VPN provision globally in court.

There's the legal issue you noted with including simple possession for an obscenity law, but the current response seems to be out of fear of bad charges and the "vibes" of what people think the law states rather than the actual text of the law that is otherwise compliant with legal obscenity laws.

How would a court challenge end up working out when the law uses "obscene" as a descriptor while amending a part of the Texas code where obscene is defined as compliant with Miller? It seems like it was written so that the text is constitutional but that it would encourage unconstitutional actions.

It clearly is unconstitutional, but in practice it will follow the results of the litigation in Paxton v FSC, which is pending before the Supreme Court, as whatever is found to be constitutional there for a bill that applies to 33% would likely be the same for "regular course of business"

This particular bill includes a credit card that requires one to be 18 as one method, so wouldn't be surprised if these bills become commonplace they tie into that. Otherwise, they do verify ages in other regions already, for example, see this page from South Korea help.netflix.com/en/node/4129...

North Dakota has a bill in their legislature that is a very similar bill with the same regular course of business language, except that it also goes out of it way to say that a platform could still be liable if they don't take steps to block VPNs even if they block the state.

Talking North Dakota, one of the age verification bills, HB1593 was also just amended to target VPN usage so it could target even websites blocking the state, stating platforms "may not rely solely on the internet protocol address to confirm the location of an individual"