The French lower house approved a bill on Thursday requiring porn sites to verify a visitor’s age. The sites are free to determine 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 to impose sanctions if they do not comply with the law. One of the options therein is site blocking at the national level. The law is just not final yet: the upper house has yet to vote on it, but Politico writes that the strong expectation is that the bill will get through without problems.
While restricting adult access to pornography is not really a topic of concern, it is not how to achieve it. While the proposal to use credit card information would achieve that goal, it has two drawbacks: not everyone has a credit card, and handing over this sensitive data is not without risk. If a site has inadequate security, not only is the fact that a person visits the site on the street, but it may also be their credit card data.
The UK has also struggled with age affirmation on porn sites for years. Those plans met with resistance from, among others, privacy experts and the technical implementation proved difficult. Partly because of this, the introduction was postponed several times, until the ship finally stranded in October last year. In Australia, people are still working on the idea.