If a war on drugs has taught us anything, a war on porn is going to lead to far worse porn being spread further than ever before while innocent lives are ruined, much like how teenagers are already being charged as adults for sexting while not adults. There are likely places the law can be improved but a blanket ban would be a large step backwards even if we ignore freedom of speech implications.
In the world where entire sites are pulled over some silly Q conspiracy theory, we can surely do more to combat porn. We've largely dealt with smoking, also addictive, also once prevalent, also while cigarettes are still available at every gas station and grocery store.
We can definitely do better, but you have to allow for legal porn with consent to remain or else you will push everything to an underground market where the end result will be far less rules to control content.
One thing that would be nice is an automated take down. Anyone who no longer consents to their porn being hosted (or who never consented) can have the selected files added to a database and all porn sites would have to take down based upon matches to this database. This technology already exists with PhotoDNA for fighting known child porn (though I think the technical details are kept secret to avoid people finding work arounds).
As long as one draws a line between consensual and nonconsensual porn then I think you'll be able to crack down on the non-consensual material without having to worry about the failures of a 'war on x'.
Think of it like the difference between cracking down on weed and cracking down on synthetic 'weed' that is killing people. Or just look at stores that are able to sell alcohol. Because it is generally allowed, specific bans are much easier to enforce because business likes keeping the legal status.
Alcohol and weed are not good examples because these are failed interventions if you consider them harmful. Consumption of both exploded in the last few decades.
This is why I use smoking: it's also legal or semi-legal, it used to be prevalent but its popularity cratered.
"Consumption of both exploded in the last few decades." -> I don't know about weed, but it's definitely not true for alcohol, it's roughly stable; in USA there has been some decrease in per capita consumption since a peak in 1980s - see https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/global_alco... for example.
Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, seems to think so. He has written a couple of books on the subject of deteriorating development of young men, and has suggested a correlation to the advent of high-speed internet.
Not sure if he's right, but it's certainly a reasonable theory.
He also did a TED talk briefly touching on the subject.
Whether you think the experiment itself was good or bad (Zimbardo recognized its failures and ended it early), the lessons it taught were invaluable and that's why they brought him in as an expert witness for the Abu Ghraib trial. Your suggestion that "lots of people write books" is a silly pooh-poohing in that context, especially considering that Zimbardo was already a Stanford professor by that time in 1971, 50 years ago.
Trashing some offices is nowhere near overthrowing a government.
And pornographers did much, much worse. They trafficked underage women, misrepresented the contracts, routinely provided drugs to dull their actors' senses, and engaged in all kinds of underhanded or outright criminal conduct.
Those cases generally aren't entrapment. They get pretty close, but they don't include the final push. The other party is free to walk away without taking the bait. Granted, I've only read the details on a few cases but in the ones I read the FBI is clear to not cross the legal boundary.
Legally that's a fair argument, but there's an ethical hazard in law enforcement catalyzing a crime that may not otherwise occur, in order to bag a person who may not otherwise be a criminal.
Some of those setups discriminate based on ethnicity, such as those that target Islamic radicals and black nationalists. In my mind, this further deepens the ethical quandary.
Sometimes a solution in search of a problem is itself a problem.
"...the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) have approached multiple activists organizing for justice for George Floyd—who was killed by Minneapolis police officers—and have alternatively attempted to entrap them or pushed them to work as informants."
Given the state of the war on drugs and the war on human trafficking, do you think that there would be less drugs and human trafficking if people were not allowed to watch porn as you suggest?
I suspect that because criminals tend to ignore the law anyway, placing restrictions on pornography will completely fail to reduce any harm as bad people will continue to do those things regardless of whether PornHub exists or not
If pornography were not legal, then production would move underground and would probably involve even more harm.
Some might suggest that there needs to be heavier regulation and more protection for the women involved but banning porn would mean zero protection for the women and an unregulated trade
