Four porn companies investigated for compliance with new age-check laws

Ofcom has launched investigations into four porn companies’ compliance with new age-check requirements under the UK’s Online Safety Act, the regulator said.

The four businesses collectively run 34 pornography sites.

The announcement was made on Thursday after the law governing adult or harmful content came into force last week.

The Online Safety Act, enforced by the UK’s communications watchdog, aims to protect children online.

Websites and apps containing pornography or harmful content are now required to have “highly effective” age verification.

On Thursday, Ofcom said it had opened “formal investigations” into whether 8579 LLC, AVS Group Ltd, Kick Online Entertainment S.A. and Trendio have those “highly effective” age check in place to protect children from accessing pornography across 34 websites.

“These companies have been prioritised based on the risk of harm posed by the services they operate and their user numbers,” Ofcom said.

“Collectively, these websites have over nine million unique monthly UK visitors.”

Before the new rules were rolled out on July 25, Ofcom said it had been too easy for children to see pornography online.

The changes are meant to force platforms to have a duty of care toward young users.

Ofcom previously said thousands of sites had already committed to age checks, including the UK’s biggest pornography site, PornHub, as well as dating apps and social media sites such Discord and Reddit.

Websites and apps can use various methods to verify a user’s age, including: AI age estimation, open banking, digital ID, credit card, email-based age estimation, mobile network operator, and/or photo ID matching.

They might carry out checks themselves or use another company to do it for them.

Sites and apps have not been told how to regulate their own platforms, but the new laws demand that platforms take a “safety-first” approach when operating in the UK.

Ofcom is responsible for enforcing these new rules.

Platforms that fail to comply risk facing a fine of up to £18m or 10% of revenue and could be shut out of the UK entirely.

Ofcom said it will now gather and analyse evidence to determine whether the four companies have broken the new age-check verification rules.

These new cases add to Ofcom’s 11 investigations already in progress into 4chan, an online suicide forum, seven file-sharing services, First Time Videos LLC and Itai Tech Ltd.

There has been a sudden surge in interest in virtual private networks (VPN) in the UK after the introduction of the new age verification rules.

Since the new checks came into force, data from Google Trends shows a significant rise in internet users searching for VPNs – and five VPNs are among the top 10 free apps trending on Apple’s App Store.