UK abandons plans for mandatory age verification for porn sites
The UK is halting plans to introduce mandatory age checks for internet porn. Instead, the country’s government will focus more broadly on protecting children online.
The policy on Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017, which mandated age verification for online porn, has been discontinued by the UK government on Wednesday. This puts an end to years of attempts to achieve a kind of porn blockade for children.
These 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; the last time was last summer, when it turned out that the UK had not informed the European Commission about the final plans, which it should have.
The UK government is now focusing on introducing a broader set of measures to protect internet users online, set out in a proposal for an Online Harms White Paper. Part of this package of measures is the introduction of an obligation to companies to improve online security. An independent regulator should monitor this. The British government wants to protect children in particular.
The development of online security technology will continue to be important in the future and will include age verification tools, the UK government said: “We expect these to continue to play a leading role in protecting children online”.
The scrapping of the plans is a blow to companies that have been developing age-checking services. Porn sites had to do more than just allow you to enter an age. For example, the check could be done by providing personal information such as passport, driver’s license, telephone number and credit card, whereby third parties have already applied the age verification. The government also mentioned buying special cards at a counter, where the age check could then take place. Online porn providers could already go through voluntary certification and then display an Age Verification Certificate logo on their site.