UK Porn ‘Age Verification’ Law Pushed Back Again; No New Date Set

The United Kingdom’s long-anticipated “age verification” law, blocking all porn sites to any user who has not uploaded official documents proving that he or she is over 18, had been set to take effect on April 1—after nearly two years of delays, after Parliament passed the anti-porn law in 2017.   But on Wednesday, the British government said that the law would no longer go into effect on the announced start date, according to a report by The Mirror newspaper. In fact, the government would not even say when the law will finally begin blocking unverified users. So for the time being, porn remains freely available online in the U.K. The government earlier claimed that the new age verification system would take effect before the end of of 2018. When that failed to happen, the government reportedly set the April, 2019, rollout date. Now the U.K.’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport says it will make an announcement about the actual date for the law to take effect “shortly.” “We are taking the time to get the implementation of this policy right and to ensure it is effective, and we will announce a commencement date shortly,” a DCMS spokesperson told Britain’s Metro news site.  But there remain serious concerns about the age verification policy, one of which being that the blocks on porn sites will be “laughably easy to get around,” using VPN network connections, according to Alistair Kelman,  CEO of SafeCast, a service that already purports to “protect children and vulnerable people from pornography, horror and inappropriate video content.” Another problem, according to digital rights activist Jim Killock, as AVN.com has reported,  is that the law will have the unintended consequence of driving teenagers into risky online behavior, as they find new ways to seek and view online porn with conventional sites blocked. Those risky actions could include downloading porn from illegal file-sharing sites, or the use of “free proxy” sites that are often havens for viruses and malware that can automatically download onto an unsuspecting user’s mobile device or computer. A recent poll by the research firm YouGov showed that three out of four U.K. residents—76 percent—remain unaware that the new law exists, and will be surprised when they find their favorite porn sites blocked by internet service providers under the new law. Photo by ChiralJon/Wikimedia Commons