Canadians Want to Cut off Americans’ PornHub Access

The trade war between the U.S. and Canada is getting nasty and two new suggestions for how to give Canada the edge could make it worse. The first is for Canada to flout U.S. intellectual property law and become a nation that exports jailbreaks. The second is to ban PornHub.

Trump’s reciprocal tariffs kick in on April 2. If they go through, they’ll disrupt the economies of both nations. Last week Ontario Premiere Doug Ford announced a 25% surcharge on electricity exports to the states before “suspending” it pending negotiations. It’s hard to know where all this ends up, how nasty it will get, and how much suffering people will endure.

Canadian science fiction writer, tech journalist, and friend of Gizmodo Cory Doctorow had a great suggestion last month that would put incredible pressure on the U.S. “What if Canada stopped upholding U.S. tech companies’ intellectual property?” He asked in a paper for the Canada Centre for Policy Alternatives.

American tech companies charge a lot of rent. Most app stores run by Amazon, Apple, or Google skim 30% off every transaction. John Deere farming equipment is hard to repair without paying the company for expensive software unlocks. Car companies, and especially Tesla, lock basic features behind electronic paywalls.

Doctorow’s suggestion is that Canada not impose tariffs on U.S. goods but go back through its trade negotiations with America and “tear up these laws” that it agreed to regarding big tech’s IP.

“You know what Canada could make? A Canadian App Store. That’s a store that Canadian software authors could use to sell Canadian apps to Canadian customers, charging, say, the standard payment processing fee of five per cent rather than Apple’s 30 per cent. Canada could make app stores for the Android, Playstation and Xbox, too,” Doctorow said.

He also suggested that the app store shouldn’t confine itself to Canadian software authors. “Canadian app stores could offer five per cent commissions on sales to U.S. and global software authors, and provide jailbreaking kits that allow device owners all around the world to install the Canadian app stores where software authors don’t get ripped off by American Big Tech companies.” That’s a much better deal than most of us get when we buy something on our phones.

In Doctorow’s calculation, Canada could manufacture devices and software to help jailbreak John Deere tractors, Teslas, and other American cars. Imagine a world where farmers paid a Canadian company for a software update, one time, instead of constantly returning to John Deere for rent-seeking computer updates. Imagine a world where you paid, once, for a device on your new car that unlocked all its software features forever.

“What’s standing in the way of a Canadian industrial policy that focuses on raiding the sky-high margins of American monopolists with third-party add-ons, mods and jailbreaks?” Doctorow said.

Another, sillier, suggestion has gone viral thanks to an Instagram reel from Canadian comedian Matthew Puzhitsky: ban PornHub. The pornography giant is based in Montreal and sees millions of American visitors every month. On March 6, Puzhitsky published a skit on Instagram where politicians looking for ways to win the trade war against Canada suggested banning the site.

The skit struck a nerve and has been covered by The New York Post and The Daily Mail. If Canada could ban Pornhub in the States, we win the trade war. That’s it. There is no trade war,” Puzhitsky told The Post.

America doesn’t need the help. PornHub is already banned in 17 statespart of restrictive new laws in conservative parts of the country that force people to show an ID to access adult websites. Rather than comply with a law that is a privacy and technological nightmare, PornHub has blocked access to its services in those states.

In these chaotic days of the second Trump presidency, anything is possible and nothing should be off the table.