why the user age verification system will not change anything immediately

Starting Saturday, porn video sites are required to more strictly verify the age of their users. These sites are normally prohibited for those under 18 years of age, but there are an extremely large number of minors who connect to them.

This is an important step for defenders of children’s rights: sites distributing pornography based in France but also outside the European Union, such as YouPorn or Pornhub, must comply from Saturday January 11 with the Arcom on the protection of minors, adopted last October. The device must make it possible to transmit proof of majority without disclosing the identity of the Internet user.

But this obligation to authenticate the age of consumers, other than by a simple declaration, only concerns sites established in France or in non-European foreign countries. Platforms hosted by our neighboring EU members are not affected at this stage. However, the biggest players in this sector are located in Cyprus or the Czech Republic. These countries escape the new rule, because for years they have been increasing legal recourse to avoid complying with French law. In particular, they have taken the matter to European justice, and are therefore not yet subject to this new regulation.

The explosion of free and open-access online pornography has over the past 20 years allowed the emergence of a real, very powerful industry, which generates billions of euros. Porn videos represent more than a quarter of global internet traffic, according to the latest Senate report devoted to the issue. The platforms are therefore exerting all their weight to fight against any form of regulation, while according to Arcom, 2.3 million minors frequent pornographic sites in France. From the age of 12, more than half of boys using the Internet visit these sites on average every month.

Australia and the United Kingdom have also been trying, for several years, to impose age control online, and are encountering the same difficulties: in particular the absence of a reliable system that can both verify age age, while respecting the anonymity of the user. Many porn fans, for obvious reasons, do not want to leave a trace of their time on the sites.