UK bill obliges all porn sites to age check again

All websites containing pornographic material are required to verify the age of visitors under the updated Online Safety Bill that the UK government is about to submit to Parliament. If sites do not do this, they risk fines or blockages.

It concerns an extension of the Online Safety Bill bill and Chris Philp, digital minister, will present this Tuesday on Safer Internet Day. The bill already included a mandatory age check for porn sites, but only commercial sites that allow the uploading of user-generated content. It also includes social media sites and search engines that provide access to porn. The addition extends this to all sites that allow users in the UK to access pornographic material.

Those sites, if the bill is passed, will be obliged to integrate ‘robust checks’ to ensure that only Britons 18 years and older can still visit them. As an example of such a check, the Ministry of Digitization, Culture, Media and Sport gives the use of verification technology to check whether a visitor has a credit card and is eighteen years of age or older. The ministry also mentions the use of third-party services to check the age.

Sites that fail to comply with the obligation or fail to comply with the obligation risk a fine from the communications authority Ofcom, which can be up to ten percent of the annual turnover. In addition, the authority can decide to block the site in question and those responsible behind the sites can be legally tackled if they do not cooperate sufficiently. Minister Philp: “It is too easy for children to access online pornography. Parents deserve the peace of mind that their children are protected from seeing things that no child should see.”

Preventing children from accessing porn sites through legislation has a long history in the UK. Back in 2010, the British government had plans for an opt-in system to prevent children from accessing porn sites against their parents’ will. After that, plans for age checks were brought up more than once, but each time they were postponed. They were criticized by privacy advocates and the European Commission, and it proved difficult to implement technically. In 2019, the UK scrapped its then-planned mandatory age checks for internet porn, but with the new Online Safety Bill bill, this is back on the table.