\n<\/p>\n
When they decided<\/span> to take on age verification<\/a> in their latest season, Industry<\/em> cocreators Konrad Kay and Mickey Down<\/a> didn\u2019t anticipate the issue would become such a political football.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was in the ether of British politics, but it wasn’t front and center when we started writing the scripts or shooting it, and then it really flared up as a kind of front-page-of-BBC topic of conversation,\u201d Kay says.<\/p>\n Season 4 of HBO\u2019s sexy and darkly funny financial drama, premiering Sunday, continues Industry<\/em>\u2019s expansion beyond the cutthroat world of investment banking into tech, porn, age verification, and politics. As the season begins, there\u2019s fighting amongst the top brass at Tender, a fintech company that\u2019s recently gone public, over whether or not to continue processing payments for Siren, an adult platform akin to OnlyFans<\/a>. While Siren and other gambling and porn companies make up a good chunk of Tender\u2019s revenue, some Tender executives are spooked by threats of sweeping new age-verification laws and anti-porn rhetoric coming from the UK\u2019s Labour Party and feel there\u2019s more to be gained by cleaning up their act.<\/p>\n In reality, the UK\u2019s Online Safety Act<\/a> requiring people to verify their ages before they can view porn and other restricted content, came into effect in July 2025, long after Kay and Down came up with the storyline for Industry<\/em>\u2019s most recent season. Still, it\u2019s had similar impacts to those felt by Siren. Pornhub\u2019s UK traffic dropped by almost 80 percent in light of the regulations and it\u2019s facing similar challenges in the US, where half of states have enacted age verification laws. In December, members of Congress considered 19 bills<\/a> aimed at protecting children and teens online, though critics have said some of them are unconstitutional<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s kind of shown how fragile free speech absolutism is,\u201d says Down, describing the \u201cwildly different\u201d opinions on the issue, from puritanism even within liberal enclaves to a censorious \u201cshut everything down\u201d approach from conservatives.<\/p>\n