I’m guessing it depends on how likely they think they will need to defend themselves in court. Going with “we pay this other company $1m/year to make sure we know who is in the State of Texas so we don’t accidentally violate the law” will likely play better in court then “we paid $10,000 3 years ago to get a database and we are scheduled to look around for an update in two more years or so”
Especially since buying the bargain basement version will get the prosecution arguing “the defendant bought the pennies on the dollar version of the list because they really don’t care if they server porn to Texas minors, they just wanted to pay as little money as possible”
(I’m not arguing what’s right, just what I think is likely to happen…it gives anyone with a GeoIP dataset an incentive to establish multiple price points, and makes the primary selling point “how good does it sound in court”)
I mean, only those providers with a physical presence in Texas, or perhaps the US will care. Every other provider will shrug and keep on serving up the goods.
This happened to me a lot a year and a half ago when I spent a month around the American side of Lake Ontario.
And within the US, it’s more annoying when you’re near a time zone change. Last month I was near the Alabama/Mississippi border and couldn’t trust my cell phone alarm clock to be in the same time zone as it was when I went to sleep.
