Pornhub is owned by a Canadian company. Could the owners block US access to protest Trump’s takeover hopes?

What began as a joke by a comedian quickly turned into speculation about how Canada could mount a powerful protest against the U.S. over President Donald Trump’s takover hopes.

Not with its own retaliatory tariffs, or shutting down every branch of Tim Horton’s and Lululemon in the U.S. — but by banning access to the Canadian-owned adult entertainment website Pornhub.

“If Canada could ban Pornhub in the States, we win the trade war. That’s it. There is no trade war,” Toronto-based comedian Matthew Puzhitsky joked to the New York Post earlier this month, referring to it as “Canada’s nuke.”

The idea behind the viral video got people talking. With Trump’s reciprocal trade tariffs coming down the track on April 2, speculation grew on social media whether Canada could actually retaliate by blocking the most visited site in the U.S.

Its troubled parent company MindGeek, since rebranded as Aylo, was acquired by Montreal-based Ethical Capital Partners equity group in March 2023 for about $400 million.

A petition urging the Canadian government to restrict Pornhub’s access to U.S. users was launched – although the man behind it says it’s not serious.

“There are people taking the petition seriously and they’re arguing… it kind of puts that spotlight on the absurdity of the whole [tariffs] and 51st state idea,” the petition’s organizer Marc Olimpo told Now Toronto last week. So far, 1,151 people have signed it.

But America is already halfway there, without Canada’s help.

Pornography restrictions have now been introduced across 17 states in the U.S., with Texas, Florida and South Carolina the latest to enforce the age verification laws. Georgia is also set to implement new laws preventing under 18s from visiting adult websites from July 2025.

States have passed laws requiring pornography websites to verify a user’s age by checking their ID or scanning their face.

“The regulation in the United States requires that the uploader attest that they hold the identity and consent from everyone appearing in content,” Solomon Friedman, a founding member of Equity Capital Partner told Canada’s National Post this month. “We have gone a step further, and now require that we hold that and verify it ourselves.”

“This is an onerous process, onerous in the sense that it costs an enormous amount of money to execute,” Friedman added.

In response, Pornhub blocked access to its content in states that passed these laws. It continues to operate in Louisiana, despite age restriction laws being implemented last year that require visitors to provide state-approved identification. The site has since reported an 80 percent drop in traffic in that state.

Florida and South Carolina also saw massive surges in VPN use since new laws were introduced to prevent people from visiting adult websites without government-approved ID.

The new laws have been pushed by allies of Trump. The president’s head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, previously called for an outright national ban on pornography, undercover footage last year revealed.

In the footage, Vought suggested going about the ban “from the back door.”

“We’ve got a number of states that are passing this and, you know, what happens is the porn company then says, ‘we’re not going to do business in your state,’ which of course is entirely what we were after, right?” Vought said.

Vought was also one of the architects behind Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for Trump’s second term, which called for pornography to be outlawed in a 900-page memo.

Critics argue restricting sites like Pornhub undermines free speech protections and infringes on privacy rights – and users could simply go elsewhere.

“There’s a reason why in Canada and the United States, in basically every Western liberal democracy, pornography is constitutionally protected as free expression,” Friedman said. “Sexual expression is part of free expression, whether they’re the ones creating the content or the ones viewing the content. I think there’s something very profoundly human about it all.”