Pornhub, Stripchat and XVideos will need to abide by the European Union’s strictest digital regulations after they were designated “very large online platforms” (VLOPs) by the EU executive on Wednesday.
The three adult content companies join the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Google and Elon Musk’s X on the bloc’s list of platforms with more than 45 million average monthly users in the EU.
Brussels will now be able to police the sites’ compliance with its strictest set of rules under the landmark Digital Services Act (DSA), including on protecting minors and addressing the dissemination of illegal content.
This is great news for niche porn sites and unregulated communities, and especially for sexual predators who used to have such a difficult time luring impressionable teens onto their creepy discord porn sharing communities because it was so easy to assess regular porn but now teens will have to learn how to navigate the tangled web of obscure fetish communities just to see a boob…
Though if they handle it sensibly it does make sense to ensure they have robust systems in place to remove illegal content including revenge porn and leaked nudes.
The very foundation of the Internet is fault tolerance. These blocks will have the effect of forcing people to use other methods. To reroute the block.
E.g. instead of verifying my ID I’ll simply use a VPN or visit a site that doesn’t have age verification.
Age verification was quite common in the late-90s for major porn sites. They’d ask for credit card numbers to prove your age. Which spawned a mass of programs to generate fake CC numbers to trick CC validation. At 16 and new to the Internet it was trivial for me to circumvent age-restricted content. I just visited non-age ID sites or used a CC faker.
This stuff will never work.
It will just make it a pain it the arse for users.