French lower house unanimously votes for compulsory age verification porn sites

The French lower house approved a bill on Thursday that requires porn sites to verify the age of a visitor. The sites can decide for themselves exactly how they do this. A government proposal is to use credit card information.

According to the proposal, the French telecom authority CSA will be given the power to inspect companies and impose sanctions if they fail to comply with the law. One of the options in there is to block a site nationally. The law has not yet passed definitively: the upper house has yet to vote on it, but Politico writes that there is a strong expectation that the bill will pass without any problems.

While restricting access to pornography to adults is not really a topic of dissension, the same is not true of how to achieve that goal. The proposal to use credit card information would achieve that goal, but it has two drawbacks: not everyone has a credit card, and handing over this sensitive information is not without risk. If a site lacks security, not only is a person’s visiting the site on the street, but possibly also their credit card data.

The UK has also struggled with age verification on porn sites for years. These plans met with resistance from privacy experts, among others, and the technical implementation turned out to be difficult. Partly because of this, the introduction was postponed several times, until the ship was permanently stranded in October of last year. In Australia people are still working on the idea.