The Legal Panel: Where Optimism Goes to Die
Between pitching sessions, I ducked into a legal panel that felt like attending a funeral for the First Amendment. Lawyers in expensive suits discussed the legislative tsunami building around age verification requirements and AI-generated content restrictions with the grim professionalism of oncologists delivering bad news.
The momentum is building. State after state is passing age verification laws that sound reasonable on CNN but function as de facto censorship when implemented. The panel dissected how these regulations work in practice, driving traffic, creating compliance nightmares for American businesses, and accomplishing absolutely nothing to protect minors while giving politicians talking points for re-election campaigns.
Then the AI conversation began, and the temperature in the room dropped another ten degrees. Regulations are coming. Platform policies are tightening. The legal framework hasn't caught up with the technology, which means everyone operating in this space is essentially beta-testing compliance strategies while lawmakers figure out what questions to ask.
I absorbed this information with the clarity of someone who's survived three decades of technological and regulatory disruption. The DVD era died. The affiliate golden age died. Tube sites nearly killed production budgets. Now AI and age verification laws represent the next extinction event, and the survivors will be whoever adapts fastest with the best infrastructure.