The owner of Pornhub has blocked access to its website in France because of its objections to a new French law requiring pornographic sites to verify the age of their users.
Adult entertainment company Aylo has “made the difficult decision to suspend access” in France to its “user-uploaded” platforms – which also include sites YouPorn and Redtube – from Wednesday, Alex Kekesi, Aylo’s vice president of brand and community, said in a statement.
For its part, Arcom, the country’s communications regulator, said in a statement Tuesday that Aylo had chosen to “shirk the requirement of protecting minors” enshrined in digital regulations “by suspending access to its content in France, including for adults.”
That’s despite the “numerous technical solutions on the market (allowing) users’ age to be verified while ensuring the protection of their personal data,” the regulator added.
Kekesi at Aylo said the company had for years tried to work with Paris to find a way to verify users’ ages without exposing “the data of millions of French people to privacy breaches and hacks” but that it could not be done.
The company, owned by Canadian private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners, argued that users’ ages should be checked from their device – such as their smartphone or computer – and should thus be the responsibility of tech companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft, rather than pornography sites.
“French citizens deserve a government and a regulator who are serious about preventing children from accessing adult content,” Kekesi said. “They also deserve laws which protect their privacy and safeguard their sensitive data.”
In 2024, France accounted for the second-biggest audience for Pornhub on a daily basis behind the United States, according to the website.
Last year, France enacted a law mandating that pornographic sites implement stricter age-verification technology. That could include asking users to provide their bank card details, Arcom said in an October document detailing aspects of the law’s implementation.
Aurore Bergé, French gender equality minister, said in a post on X Tuesday that Aylo’s decision meant “there will be less violent, degrading and humiliating content accessible to minors in France.”
“Pornhub, YouPorn, and Redtube refuse to comply with our legal framework and decide to leave. Good!” she said.
Around the world, jurisdictions are ramping up efforts to protect minors online.
In the United States, 19 states – home to more than a third of Americans – have in recent years passed laws requiring pornographic sites to confirm a user’s age by checking a government-issued ID or scanning their face, among other methods.
The laws have led some of the largest adult sites, including Pornhub, to block users from those states, rather than paying millions for ID-checking services.
And, last week, the European Commission launched an investigation into Pornhub and three other major adult websites, accusing them of not complying with regulations designed to protect minors from accessing pornography.
The bloc’s executive body said in a statement lat week that it is developing an age-verification app to allow people to prove they are older than 18 without revealing other information about themselves online.
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