The U.K. Government has postponed the introduction of controversial new regulations that have come to be known as the 'Porn Block' and would have blocked those under the age of 18 from viewing online porn from April. The requirement for robust age-verification controls for providers of online pornography was introduced as part of the Digital Economy Act of 2017, and earlier this year the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) was designated as the age verification regulator. Any site accessible to U.K. users that fails to abide by the new regulations faces fines of up to £250,000. Blanket bans on non-compliant sites, the so-called porn block itself, would be implemented by every U.K. internet service provider.
Mindgeek, which owns Pornhub, RedTube, YouPorn and Brazzers, developed a verification system called AgeID. That requires any user from the U.K. to verify their age before being able to access the sites and would work by way of using a driving license, passport, credit card or a 'porn pass' PortesCard that could be purchased from high street retailers for £4.99 assuming proof of age was provided. The potential for abusing such a system was not lost on supporters and those who oppose the system alike. Those who even knew that such a change was coming, that is. And according to a YouGov survey some 76% of people had never heard of the porn block, let alone knew it was meant to be starting in April.
According to the Mirror Online a Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) spokesperson has now "confirmed that the official rollout plans will be announced shortly" and the April 1 commencement date no longer stands. That same spokesperson said that "adult content is currently too easy to access on the internet, we're making sure the protections that exist for children offline are provided online too." But how effective will these protections actually be?
Alistair Kelman, director and CEO at SafeCast which provides a safe harbor for on-demand TV and video, told me that the Porn Block as put forward by the Digital Minister will not deliver on the Government's promise to make the U.K. the safest place to be online. "It will be laughably easy to get around through the use of a VPN" Kelman warns, adding that "since BBC iPlayer today will not work via a VPN, this will drive porn seeking children away from Britain's premier video catchup service and into the clutches of unregulated foreign sources of video."
In her speech to the Royal Television Society last year, Sharon White who is the CEO of Ofcom, the British media regulator, made it clear that parity of protection for children, regardless of medium, was paramount to answering the challenges of censorship. "The broadcasting and online worlds are competing under different conditions" White stated "even as the online world takes up an ever greater share of our time. This has profound consequences for viewers - especially for children, who may well not distinguish between the two." Warning of a standards lottery, where without realizing it viewers can be watching the same content but governed by different regulation in different places, or even none at all, White concluded that "if protection matters, and we all believe it does, this cannot be our message to viewers: choose your screen and take your chances." And here lies the rub according to Kelman. "The Porn Block is not going to protect children on social networks" he says, as "social networks are excluded, despite the fact that Twitter and Reddit are littered with pornographic content."
So, where does this leave us if, as a society, we want to protect the vulnerable from sexual exploitation via the ease of access to hardcore pornographic content? "The way of regulating the internet without breaking it is via best practice" Kelman insists "which can be enforced by regulators such as Ofcom through the use of civil law in licensing." This approach does not criminalize aberrant behavior but it pushes industry and society toward safer practices which are long term social norms. "This is what SafeCast told the Digital Minister in a letter we sent to him last October" Kelman explains, adding that SafeCast also asked the Information Commissioner's Office to "include a requirement for generic metadata content labelling to protect children" in the forthcoming Age Appropriate Design Code.
