WASHINGTON — For the second time in recent weeks, a Republican congressman has introduced legislation to bar U.S. courts from helping to enforce foreign laws restricting speech that would domestically be protected under the First Amendment, potentially including foreign age verification laws.
Introduced by Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio, the proposed Halting Overseas Mandates from Extraterritorially Reaching Onto National Territory (HOMEFRONT) Act of 2026 is similar in intent to the Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny and Extortion (GRANITE) Act, which Davidson’s fellow Ohio representative Michael Rulli introduced last month. Both bills would prohibit domestic courts from recognizing or enforcing foreign judgments, fines, orders or demands issued by a foreign court or a foreign state, enforcing a “foreign censorship law.”
The GRANITE Act defines “foreign censorship law” as any law of a foreign state that “has the primary purpose or substantial effect of restricting or penalizing expression, expressive conduct, or expressive association; targets expression, expressive conduct, or expressive association based on its content, viewpoint, or speaker identity … and would conflict with the protections of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution if recognized in the United States.”
The HOMEFRONT Act similarly defines “foreign censorship law” as “a law of a foreign country that imposes liability for conduct that would be protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States if the conduct occurred in the United States,” but further specifies that this includes laws that impose restrictions related to online safety and “harmful” content.
Would Foreign AV Laws Be Classified as Censorship?
As XBIZ reported in August, when the GRANITE Act was introduced, such provisions raise the question of whether or not age verification laws, such as the AV provisions in the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and the U.K.’s Online Safety Act (OSA), would be classified as foreign censorship laws. If so, enactment of either bill could potentially protect U.S.-based adult sites from domestic enforcement of those laws, such as pursuing fines against U.S.-based sites. Foreign governments and agencies could still take domestic measures such as blocking U.S. sites within their own territory, however.
A press release from Davidson’s office specifically called out the OSA and U.K. media regulator Ofcom, stating, “The UK’s Online Safety Act, which entered into force last year, purports to give Ofcom jurisdiction over essentially any online service in the world, whether based in the UK or not.”
The release cites Ofcom’s issuance of 197 information requests to businesses with U.S. addresses as evidence that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act grants overbroad immunity from lawsuits to foreign governments, and quotes Davidson as saying, “Foreign governments have no business policing the speech of American citizens. Foreign regulators are using fines and legal threats to pressure American companies into censoring speech protected by the First Amendment.”
Importantly for adult sites, neither the GRANITE Act nor the HOMEFRONT Act expressly includes or excludes age verification laws when it comes to defining “foreign censorship.” Rulli’s and Davidson’s office have also not responded to queries about whether the bills are intended to include AV laws. As a result, U.S. companies could argue that AV laws like the OSA and DSA fit the bill’s definition of foreign censorship, but such a determination would most likely involve a domestic court applying the standard set in the pivotal case Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton.
Ruling in that case, the Supreme Court declared that “the First Amendment leaves undisturbed States’ traditional power to prevent minors from accessing speech that is obscene from their perspective. That power includes the power to require proof of age before an individual can access such speech.” The court upheld the constitutionality of state AV laws so long as they only “incidentally” burden the protected speech of adults. Foreign laws found to fulfill that requirement could therefore be exempted from classification as censorship under the provisions in the GRANITE Act and the HOMEFRONT Act, but that would be up to reviewing courts to determine on a case-by-case basis.
Industry attorney Corey Silverstein told XBIZ, “The argument for HOMEFRONT protection becomes stronger where a foreign law reaches broader categories of lawful expression, employs an expansive definition of ‘harmful content,’ imposes particularly burdensome or privacy-invasive verification requirements, or otherwise restricts adult access more substantially than the Texas law upheld in Paxton. The analysis would therefore remain law-specific and fact-specific.”
Attorney Lawrence Walters observed, however, that most foreign regulatory frameworks that concern U.S. adult sites, like the OSA and DSA, are not written narrowly enough to ensure that they qualify as only incidentally burdening protected speech.
“They often rest on broader categories such as ‘harmful content,’ pornography definitions that reach constitutionally protected adult speech, extraterritorial information demands and compelled identity collection,” Walters said. “HOMEFRONT’s express inclusion of ‘online safety,’ ‘harmful content’ and ‘compelled disclosure of user information’ makes it easier to argue that those regimes are precisely what the bill is intended to cover.”
Similarities and Differences
While comparable in intent, the GRANITE Act and the HOMEFRONT Act contain different language. According to Walters, this makes the two bills “close cousins, not twins.”
“HOMEFRONT is the more aggressive and more explicit of the two on ‘online safety’-style regulation, including the kinds of extraterritorial AV and data-demand orders U.S. adult platforms have already received from foreign regulators,” Walters told XBIZ. “HOMEFRONT also goes further operationally, including barring U.S. government cooperation and extradition in covered cases.”
Silverstein also described the HOMEFRONT Act as going further than GRANITE in several respects.
“It places the burden on the party seeking enforcement, creates separate due-process and Section 230 defenses and authorizes injunctive relief, attorneys fees and $25,000 in statutory damages,” Silverstein noted, referring to HOMEFRONT Act provisions that would require a domestic court to affirm that a foreign court’s exercise of jurisdiction aligns with due-process requirements under the U.S. Constitution, and that would exempt interactive computer services by reaffirming Section 230 protections in cases involving foreign jurisdiction.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects interactive computer services, including adult platforms, from liability for user-uploaded content unless a site unlawfully promotes and facilitates prostitution or sex trafficking.
“Even if a foreign judgment survives HOMEFRONT’s First Amendment analysis, a domestic court could not enforce it against an interactive computer service unless the party seeking enforcement proves that the judgment would also be consistent with Section 230,” Silverstein explained.
Last year, an exemption for interactive computer services caused enforcement of an Ohio age verification law to hit a snag, when Pornhub asserted that the law does not apply to it because Pornhub qualifies as such a service. The Ohio legislature is currently weighing a bill that would exclude adult content providers from that exemption.
For sites that host user-generated adult content, Walters observed, the HOMEFRONT Act provides “significantly clearer protection” than GRANITE’s First Amendment definition alone.
“It still would not cover material the platform itself created, and it would not automatically invalidate every foreign age verification law after Paxton,” Walters said. “But it would make it much harder to use American courts to enforce extraterritorial publisher liability that Section 230 already forbids.”
Rulli and Davidson are not the only elected officials advocating for a federal law protecting U.S. companies from “foreign censorship.” Republican Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri stated last year that he intended to introduce similar legislation. At the state level, Wyoming earlier this year weighed its own version of the GRANITE Act, which passed the state House but failed to advance in the state Senate.
Trump administration officials have also repeatedly characterized European content laws as an attack on free speech, going so far as to impose visa restrictions on EU figures the administration perceives as leading “efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.” This may indicate potential administration support, should either the GRANITE Act or the HOMEFRONT Act advance in the legislative process.
Both bills have been referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.
