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Pornhub has announced it will restrict access to its website in the UK, blaming the tougher age checks which have been introduced for explicit sites.
From 2 February, only people who have previously made a Pornhub account will be able to access its content.
The company says it’s a result of what it calls the “failure” of Online Safety Act (OSA) requirements for some sites to use age verification to stop children seeing pornography online.
In October, Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo, said the law change had caused traffic to the website to fall by 77%.
The regulator, Ofcom, said at the time tougher age checks were fulfilling their purpose of stopping children stumbling across inappropriate material.
An Ofcom spokesperson said on Tuesday “porn services have a choice between using age checks to protect users as required under the Act, or to block access to their sites in the UK”.
The regulator said it would continue its dialogue with Aylo “to understand this change to its position”.
Pornhub remains the UK’s largest porn platform, according to web tracker Similarweb.
It was one of thousands of sites which implemented ways for UK visitors to prove they were over 18 as age verification requirements took effect last summer.
Alex Kekesi, head of community and brand at Aylo, said in a statement on Tuesday the move to restrict UK access to Pornhub had been a “difficult decision”.
“Our sites, which host legal and regulated porn, will no longer be available in the UK to new users, but thousands of irresponsible porn sites will still be easy to access.”
She said the platform initially complied with OSA obligations “because we wanted to believe that a determined and prepared regulator in Ofcom could take poor legislation and manage to enforce compliance in a meaningful way”.
But six months after age check requirements were introduced to stop children accessing adult content, Kekesi said the company’s experience “strongly suggests that the OSA has failed to achieve that objective”.
Those attempting to access Pornhub in the UK after 2 February will effectively be met with “a wall” instead of site content, she told reporters on Tuesday.
The same restrictions will apply to other porn sites owned by Aylo, including YouPorn and Redtube.
Solomon Friedman of Ethical Capital Partners (ECP), which owns Aylo, said the company believed Ofcom was “working in good faith” to enforce age check requirements.
“The problem here, however, is not the regulator – it is the law,” he said.
“You have a dedicated regulator working in good faith, but unfortunately, the law they are operating under cannot possibly succeed,” Friedman added.
He said six months after the requirement for sites allowing sexually explicit content took effect in the UK, people were still able to easily access porn – such as by searching for it online.
Emma Drake, partner of online safety and privacy at law firm Bird and Bird, said research cited by Aylo suggesting adults were seeking riskier porn sites also stated overall use of porn sites by adults had fallen
“The same must be true of children,” she told the BBC.
“The determined will find alternative routes, like the VPNs or the new entrants Aylo mentioned, but adding barriers to the most well-known sites can still protect a very large number of children who won’t make that effort.”
The company reiterated its position that device manufacturers such as Apple, Google and Microsoft were best placed to introduce technical measures to stop children accessing porn sites.
“When access is controlled at the device level, it is efficient, it’s effective, it’s privacy-preserving,” Friedman said.
Ofcom’s spokesperson said there was “nothing to stop” tech firms from coming up with age assurance methods at device level, adding “we would urge the industry to get on with that if they can evidence it is highly effective”.
But they said its job was “to enforce the rules as they stand”.
“We’ve put in place age assurance rules that are flexible and proportionate, and we have seen widespread adoption,” the spokesperson added.
Cyber security expert Dr Chelsea Jarvie told the BBC controls implemented at device level, while likely to play a role in age assurance, “are not a silver bullet”.
“Virtual Private Networks continue to offer a workaround which is why protecting children online requires layered controls rather than reliance on any single measure,” she said.
VPNs allow people to effectively disguise their location online, and give the appearance of using the internet as though they are in a different country.
Downloads of VPN apps soared in the UK after age verification requirements took effect on 25 July.
Peers in the House of Lords recently voted to pass an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to “prohibit the provision” of VPNs to children.
Additional reporting by Laura Cress and Chris Vallance
