Adult Check

» see adultcheck.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Congress passed the Communications Decency Act in 1996, and within months a company in the San Fernando Valley had turned the resulting legal anxiety into a business model. Cybernet Ventures, founded by Laith Alsarraf and Vardan Sarkisov, sold a thing called an Adult Check PIN. You paid once and got a number, and that number opened the gate at every site in the network. The script that did the checking was free to any site that wanted it.

The economics were the clever part. Adult Check charged the visitor $19.95 for a year and passed roughly half of what it collected back to whichever member site had referred them, mailing out thousands of checks every two weeks. A site owner paid nothing and received a cut of every signup they sent, which meant the network grew on the self-interest of the people already inside it. By February 1999 the Los Angeles Times put it at around fifty thousand member sites and over three million members. In June 2000 Alsarraf told a federal commission on online child protection that a PIN opened over two hundred thousand sites.

Age verification was an American legal artifact, invented to answer an American statute, and no Turkish equivalent of it ever existed. The internet I was dialing into in 1998 had no gatekeeper layer of this kind at all, in either direction. The company earns a headstone less for what it was checking than for the structure it proved out: a single credential, sold once, honored across a federation of sites that had no other relationship with each other.

~ the dossier ~

~ the webmasters cut ~

In July 1999 PC Data ranked adultcheck.com the ninety sixth most visited domain in the United States, with 1,934,000 unique users, seventeen places behind apple.com. The panel behind that number was fifty five thousand home users and did not yet include anyone on AOL, which is worth stating alongside the ranking rather than after it.

Forbes visited in 2001 and found the headquarters in a former plumbing supply warehouse, with an eleven thousand square foot call center in Burbank. The figures in that piece are the ones everybody quotes and they come from one source: four hundred thousand member sites, and four million customers across as many as a hundred and twenty countries. The same article records a price that had quietly changed from twenty dollars a year to twenty dollars a quarter, which turned a thing you bought into a thing that kept charging you.

~ what perfect 10 proved ~

In April 2002 a federal judge in Los Angeles granted a preliminary injunction against Cybernet Ventures in a suit brought by the magazine publisher Perfect 10. The ruling held that the company was unlikely to reach the safe harbor the DMCA offers to intermediaries. It reviewed the sites it admitted and took a direct financial benefit from what they hosted, while retaining the practical ability to control them. A central operator vouching for its members was exactly what made the network valuable, and it was also what stopped a court treating the operator as a passive conduit.

Ten weeks later, two British shelf companies called Lineclick Limited and Inputdeep Limited, both incorporated that May, were renamed ACMP Limited and AC Europe Services Limited on the same day, sharing one registered office in Harrow. From then on the footer of the website named a London company rather than a Californian one. Companies House does not say these ran Adult Check; the site's own footers do, and the two records line up exactly.

~ nickels a day ~

What the site was selling changed completely between 2004 and 2008, and the archived pages show it: in 2004 the navigation still sells an ID and explains the system, and by 2008 the same layout is advertising a two-tiered membership plan costing only nickels a day, with the webmaster program gone and no mention anywhere of verifying anyone's age. It had become an ordinary single paysite wearing an old name.

The last capture with a real page behind it is 28 December 2010, at 8,428 bytes. Nothing at all is captured until May 2013, by which point the address returns a redirect into an affiliate link for a live cam site. By August 2015 it is a parking page. ACMP Limited and AC Europe Services Limited were struck off and dissolved on 6 January 2015, having last filed accounts for the year ending May 2013.

~ excluded from the archive ~

One last thing is strange enough to record. You cannot look adultcheck.com up in the Internet Archive: the CDX index answers 403 with an empty body, and a replay says the URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine. Exclusions like that generally follow a request from whoever controls the domain. That domain remains registered and locked, paid up until 2027. Nothing whatsoever answers at it. Somebody is quietly keeping the lights off.

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