Pornhub is blocking itself in the United Kingdom on February 2, arguing that the country’s age verification laws are ineffective, the company announced on Tuesday.
As of February 2, only users who have already registered with Pornhub and completed age verification will be able to access the site. New users will not be able to register.
The move comes after a new set of provisions aimed at keeping minors from viewing porn kicked in last July, requiring adults to submit to age-estimating face scans, ID document uploads, credit card checks, and more, in order to verify that they are not minors.
Pornhub said its traffic from UK users dropped 77 percent after the Online Safety Act kicked in.
But in a presentation Tuesday, the company said many porn sites have not complied with the laws, rendering them useless.
“We believe we can no longer participate in the flawed system that is in the UK as a result of the Online Safety Act,” says Alex Kekesi, Pornhub’s vice president of brand and community.
“Our sites, which host legal and regulated porn, will no longer be available in the UK to new users, but thousands of irresponsible porn sites will still be easy to access,” the company noted in a news release.
Solomon Friedman, vice president of compliance of private equity firm Ethical Partners Capital (ECP), which owns Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo, did a demonstration during the presentation showing that the six out of the 10 Google results for “free porn” in the UK are non-compliant with age verification laws.
“ECP does not wish for one single minor to be able to access adult content, not just on Aylos’s platforms, but on any adult platforms,” he said. However, he said, regulators have not been given the legislative tools they need to succeed.
“Even those regulators acting in good faith, like the United Kingdom, simply have no hope of meeting their stated goal and our stated goal of keeping kids safe online.”
Friedman said that, in order to succeed, tech giants like Microsoft, Apple, and Google, must either proactively provide device-based age verification or be forced to by lawmakers. WIRED reached out to all three companies but did not immediately receive a response.
In November, Aylo sent letters to Apple, Google, and Microsoft, urging them to support device-based age verification across their operating systems, which would mean that personal data would be kept on a person’s phone or computer rather than submitted to a third-party site.
In Tuesday’s presentation, Friedman said the tech companies had not responded to the letters.
Microsoft previously pointed WIRED to a policy proposal that said age verification should be applied at the service level while Apple sent WIRED its child online safety report, noting that web content filters are turned on by default for every user under 18. Google spokesperson Karl Ryan previously told WIRED that adult entertainment apps are not available on its app store and that companies like Aylo “need to invest in specific tools to meet their own legal and responsibility obligations.”
In the US, 25 states have also implemented age verification, and Pornhub has pulled out of the majority of those states. Despite this, the US remains the top traffic generator for the site, and age verification laws are easily circumvented by using a VPN that can block one’s location.
State attorneys general are also beginning to take action against xAI in response to the proliferation of nonconsensual sexual images on X, via people using its chatbot Grok.
Friedman said Tuesday that Google Images has “thumbnails of every single porn image cached available online.” However, he added, current age verification laws do nothing to address explicit content on social media sites. He argued that using device-based age verification could be used to “filter either explicit tweets or posts on X or explicit use of AI chat bots or explicit Reddit subreddits and posts.”
