Dana Hess writes for South Dakota Searchlight, an online news organization.

I spent an inordinate amount of time during my journalism career writing headlines. Sometimes I miss it. Especially when a story comes along about the last meeting of the legislative Study Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Regulation of Internet Access by Minors.

If I was writing the headline for that story it would say: Lawmakers spend the summer studying porn sites. That ought to get the attention of readers.

Lawmakers on the committee might quibble with that headline, explaining that they were studying how to keep minors away from porn sites, rather than studying the porn sites themselves. If that’s the case, then the jury is still out on whether or not they succeeded.

After a summer of study, the consensus on the committee seemed to be — let’s do what Texas does. If their focus is going to be on Texas, some taxpayers may have preferred that lawmakers spend their summer trying to figure out a way to get that state to pay for the National Guard deployments that South Dakota has sent to the southern border without reimbursement.

Instead, lawmakers on the study committee decided to follow the example of a Texas law mandating porn web sites to require age verification for everyone who enters the site. That law was signed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott last year and requires users to upload a photo of a government ID to access a pornographic website. The Texas law carries fines of up to $10,000 per violation by a site. That fine could go up to $250,000 per violation if it involves a minor.

The Texas law has had quite a journey through the court system. The law was challenged by a group of pornographic web site operators called the Free Speech Coalition with representation by the American Civil Liberties Union. The law was blocked by a district court judge. The state appealed and that decision was struck down on a 2-1 vote by a federal appeals court. Now the case is in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court.

According to an article in Forbes, the Free Speech Coalition believes the age-verification process is “invasive and burdensome with significant privacy risks for adult consumers.” In the same article, an attorney from the ACLU said the Texas law allows “the government to rob adults of their online privacy and burden their access to protected speech, all under the guise of protecting children.”

The Texas law is in effect while the Supreme Court contemplates its decision. This has caused some ramifications in Texas. According to the Texas Tribune, the popular porn site Pornhub has blocked access for users with Texas IP addresses. This has sparked interest by Texans in VPNs or Virtual Private Networks. VPNs hide IP addresses and sell themselves as a service that protects your online privacy.

South Dakota lawmakers may be backing the wrong horse if they’re putting their hopes on the Texas law. The Supreme Court has ruled in the past that trying to put limitations on access to pornography is an unconstitutional restriction on free speech.

Putting aside the constitutional question, the size of the task of regulating the internet is monumental. A study by scholars at Michigan State University and the University of Iowa estimated there are at least 4 million adult web sites. That’s a stark example of how tough it will be to put the clamps on something that truly is a world wide web. Is someone in state government going to be tasked with visiting each site to see if it’s complying with the state’s age-verification law?

A state law that seeks to monitor the internet is not the answer. Lawmakers should put their efforts into making sure parents have the resources they need to protect their children themselves. That could mean literature on how to talk to kids about staying safe online or a state stipend that helps with the purchase of web filters or blocking software.

In this case, lawmakers’ intentions are good, but they’ll never be able to police the internet or take on the responsibilities that are best handled by parents.