Extract:
French visitors to the pornography website Pornhub were greeted with an unusual sight last Wednesday: not a collection of X-rated videos but a mocked up image of Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People. Next to the picture was a statement of defiance more fitting to the 21st century. “Freedom has no off button,” it read in English.
The second surprise was that there was no getting past Marianne to Pornhub’s usual fare. The site’s owner, Aylo, had preemptively blocked access to its porn empire, which also include the video-sharing platforms YouPorn, RedTube and Tube8.
Aylo, formerly MindGeek, was responding to a French law passed in 2024 mandating that pornography sites implement strict age-verification systems to prevent minors accessing adult content. More urgently, it was acting against a Friday deadline prescribed by the legislation. Since then all pornography users in France must verify their age using a credit card or government ID.
Before Aylo’s sites went dark in France, users could confirm their age by self-declaring that they were 18.
The French digital regulator Arcom has said that 2.3 million underage people access porn websites every month in the country, 12% of France’s total user base.
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Honza Cervenka, a revenge porn lawyer at McAllister Olivarius, compared Aylo’s demand to asking a car company at the point of purchase to “make sure no one with a licence ever drives that car”.
“It’s really just a big game of chicken” between tech firms, governments and regulators, Cervenka said. “We have rounds of these interim disagreements, refusals, pulling out of markets, and the tech companies know people are probably going to be able to access them anyway through a VPN.”
This cycle may come to the UK on 25 July, when platforms hosting pornography must meet new online child safety rules, including robust age checks. Corby, whose organisation helped develop the age-verification software that will be used in the UK, suspects Aylo will leave Brits in the dark too. If Westminster politicians are like France’s, they may not mind.