Porn site age-check law demanded by media regulator
 

A UK industry regulator has called for the law to be changed to require pornography sites to carry out age checks before granting access.

Video-on-demand watchdog Atvod said the government must act to protect children from seeing graphic adult material.

It said credit and debit card operators would be forbidden from processing payments from British customers to sites that did not comply.

But one campaigner said the action would be a "worthless gesture".

The Authority for Television On Demand (Atvod) said the matter was so urgent that it was "critical the legislation is enacted during this Parliament".

To back up its demand, the body commissioned market research firm Nielsen Netview to install equipment that monitored the online habits of 45,000 desktop PC and laptop users over the course of a month. The volunteers were picked to reflect a cross-section of the wider population.

Many gambling sites already use age verification checks to deter underage visitors
The survey indicated that over the period:

6% of children aged 15 years or younger had accessed an adult website
5% of visitors to such sites had been under-18
One website alone - Pornhub - had been visited by 112,000 boys in the UK aged between 12 and 17-years-old
Of the wider population, 23% of those who had used the net over the month had visited an adult site
Visitors to adult sites spent an average of 15 minutes looking at them during each visit and typically clocked up two-and-a-half hours of time in total over the month
Atvod added that the survey probably underestimated the scale of the issue since smartphone and tablet use was not included in the figures.

Porn licences

The regulator already forces UK-based sites to carry out age verification checks before explicit photographs and videos can be viewed.

This can be done by requiring valid credit card details, or other personal information that can be cross-referenced with the electoral roll or another ID database.

However, the body said the vast majority of online pornography was downloaded from businesses based overseas, over which it had no control.

To tackle this, Atvod said it wanted all adult sites to request a licence that would only be granted if they had age checks in place. Payment processors would be ordered not to handle fees for premium services - such as higher definition or longer clips - from UK citizens to unregistered sites.

"We're a very substantial market and to access the money that's flowing from the UK would be quite a powerful incentive to introduce restrictions," Atvod's chief executive, Pete Johnson told the BBC.

Mixed reactions
The UK government has already pressured the UK's major internet service providers to use software filters that automatically block adult material unless households specifically ask for them to be turned off.

However, a spokesman for the coalition government indicated it needed time to consider Atvod's request.

"We will continue to work with industry and others to look at where further action could be taken, including around age restrictions," he said.

Labour has, however, already come out in support of the move.

"It is only by threatening to cut off the flow of money that we will force these websites to act responsibly, and payment processors need legal clarity before they can act to help achieve this," said shadow culture minister, Helen Goodman.

However, Sex and Censorship - which describes itself as a free speech campaign group - said the move would prove ineffective.

"It won't make any difference to the sites that give all their videos away for free and sell advertising because they don't need credit card processing," said Jerry Barnett.

"And some sites are already accepting bitcoin and other anonymous online payment systems. A clampdown on card payments would just accelerate this trend.

"Even if implemented, this measure would have no effect on the range of content available to British consumers."

Mr Barnett previously ran a UK-based adult website himself until he was fined for failing to prevent children accessing its content.

'Significant win'

Mindgeek, the Luxembourg-based operator of adult site Pornhub, said it already carried out age verification checks in countries where this was required. But it indicated this did not address the crux of the problem.

"There is no single 'silver bullet' solution to protecting children and adolescents from potentially harmful content and interactions in their digital lives," said a spokeswoman.

"The best solution lies in a multi-layered approach in which the parent assumes the central role."

Atvod acknowledged its proposal was only part of the solution, but it insisted that the scheme could still be designed to make a difference.

"The material that appears on the free services is placed there by the paid services to attract customers to sign up to subscriptions.

"As long as the paid service placed content on a free service without age verification it would be in breach of its licensing conditions and so would not be able to access funds from the UK.

"We're not saying this will stop all children seeing all pornography online.

"But our argument is that even if you reduce the number of children who are accessing hardcore pornography online by 10%, that would be a significant win."



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26779639

A nice little personal earner for someone.

Yes that bald headed CUNT Pete Johnson from ATVOD whose salary and pension alone take 25% OF ALL Atvod fees, not just porn, BUT ALL fees is desperate to feather his nest whilst it's still got some legs.

"One website alone - Pornhub - had been visited by 112,000 boys in the UK aged between 12 and 17-years-old"

Yeah Pete you CUNT, but that's all FREE anyway so your credit card bull shit is just bull shit.

"However, a spokesman for the coalition government indicated it needed time to consider Atvod's request.

"We will continue to work with industry and others to look at where further action could be taken, including around age restrictions," he said.

Labour has, however, already come out in support of the move."

"To back up its demand, the body commissioned market research firm Nielsen Netview to install equipment that monitored the online habits of 45,000 desktop PC and laptop users over the course of a month."

Fucking LOL's I used to work for "AC Nielsen" in a previous decade, hmmmmm Homescan, their store data is usable if you assume they make the same cock ups and "manipulate the data" evenly but anything they put in your home is a crock of shit.

I thought they were already trying to implement this by requiring the credit card age verification? Although I haven't been paying attention to any of it since I shut down my bluebird blog.

They have for UK providers, but ATVOD and Pete Johnson of ATVOD are so clueless they realised that everything they were trying to do was pointless unless they stopped porn coming in from overseas. So in a desperate attempt to justify their existence and maintain Pete's £100K a year plus income they came up with the idea of preventing UK consumers from purchasing porn from companies based overseas that didn't cover up the cunts and dicks. That seemed to have gone quiet for a period, probably because NORMAL people thought it was a dumb, pointless, unworkable idea. But now Atvod have done one of their big pre-planned press releases, in what seems quite a desperate attempt to stay alive. Pete the CUNT knows that unless he can get UK banks to censor and block the free purchasing will of the UK his organisation has no balls and no legitimacy.

But he is such a thicko that even if he achieved this it still wouldn't make one iota of difference to kids ability to see porn, aka Twitter, Tumblr, Tubes. ATVOD is nothng more than Pete Johnsons personal pension plan and there are few things I have been angrier about in my entire life :)

Ultimately this would be a good thing for the British porn industry.
Hopefully it catches on everywhere.

Solution... partner with someone outside of uk if you live in uk

I for one would love to make my tours all non-nude, and have nudity banned unless behind an age verified members area :)


Maybe when the UN gets control over the internet something like this could happen for the whole world.

Glad I am not in the UK then.

You know what - fuck it - I, personally, fully support the idea making porn accessible via age verification only. It's crazy how young the kids are nowadays being exposed. Parents are too fucking stupid to monitor and we also need a solution to alleviate freebie-freeloader-freddy from making people, that are cancer to the industry, rich by way of accountability. So this would be a Win-win.

But it'll ever happen. People and freedoms... you know.

Hey, if you feel so strongly about this, how about voluntarily putting your own sites behind age verification walls? How difficult would that be?

This would probably infringe European law Article 14. Unless they could get all member states to adopt similar it would probably be regarded as a barrier to free trade across the single market.

and how do you feel about paying for a licence for every adult site you have which is what they want you to do?

So will they also want these sites covered too? Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr etc?

So what exactly is stopping you from doing so?

Email from them:

Emailed on Behalf of Peter Johnson





Dear Stakeholder,



ATVOD has today published a research report providing data on the scale of underage access to adult websites. Although ATVOD acts to ensure that UK-based adult services keep hardcore porn out of reach of children, we have no powers to act in relation to websites operated from overseas, where most adult websites are based.



The figures we have published today reveal very significant levels of underage access and are based on the actual online activity of a demographically balanced panel of approximately 45,000 UK internet users. The figures also demonstrate the scale and nature of the overall UK market for online pornography and this has a bearing on the policy options for reducing underage access.



23 of the 25 most frequently visited adult websites provided instant, free and unrestricted access to hardcore pornographic videos and still images featuring explicit images of real sex. The free videos are offered as a ‘loss leader’ and are designed to encourage viewers to sign up to subscription services. None of the most frequently accessed services is operated from the UK, so they fall outside the scope of the regulations enforced by ATVOD.



Among other things, the report calls for Government action to make clear that online services which allow children to access hardcore pornography are acting in breach of UK law, even if the service is operated from outside the UK. Such clarity in law would enable the UK payments industry to act to prevent payments flowing to non-UK pornographers who make hardcore pornographic material available for children to view – an initiative that ATVOD and the UK payments industry have been working on for some time. Although such action would not affect the free services directly, such services depend for content and income on associated and affiliated pay services, so cutting off the flow of funds would remove their incentive and restrict their ability to provide free content to UK visitors without having robust age verification measures in place.



The full report is published at http://atvod.co.uk/uploads/files/For...Only_FINAL.pdf.



Kind regards,



Susan Robinson

Office Manager/PA to Peter Johnson, CEO

I'm sure the increase in sales would make it well worth the fee's. I doubt this would hurt anyone except the freeloaders.




You can't be serious... There would be no pointe in doing it unless everyone else was too.

oh, and I have always had non-nude tours available for affiliates to use ;)

I dont see the big free sites getting behind this - The only way that would happen is if there was consensus and all of them did it - That will simply never happen...

No gouvernment anywhere in the world gives a shit about the porn industry. And for the most part neither does the voting public. No one is listening to those asshole kids on reddit and facebook.

What they are trying to do is

1) Figure how to censor porn without increasing its preceived value. (censorship tends to do that)
2) Figure out how to make a buck off of censoring porn
3) Figure out how to censore it without 90% of the players relocating their sites abroad
4) Not set a precedent that can later be used against sites like youtube.

Yes I can be serious, unless you were attempting to be ironic!

In Turkey, currently twitter and youtube are both censored, but not pornhub , youporn and the such:

http://en.rsf.org/turkey-youtube-blo...014,46050.html

And: "There is no technical problem at our end. Internet users who modify their DNS settings or use VPNs are the only ones in Turkey who can now access YouTube.".

In fact, in several european countries the ISPs are removing the domain names of unlicensed gambling sites since many years, still everyone learned how to change DNS into google or other full DNS.

Let UK force ISPs to blacklist non-compliant pornhub's at some time, UK people may soon learn to change DNS, I guess.

An Atvod spokesman added: ‘The material that appears on the free services is placed there by the paid services to attract customers to sign up to subscriptions.

‘As long as the paid service placed content on a free service without age verification it would be in breach of its licensing conditions and so would not be able to access funds from the UK.

‘We're not saying this will stop all children seeing all pornography online.
‘But our argument is that even if you reduce the number of children who are accessing hardcore pornography online by 10 per cent, that would be a significant win.’



http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti....html#comments

So if a firm a pays the affiliate a check. How will the banks know if the site is licenced or not.

For instance say there is a big tube site and the chap who owns it gets a check. In many cases it may simply be in the name of the owner, such as MrBrown. So how will the bank know MrBrown owns that big porn site.

Also some firms use a separate firm for checks, so the firm sending the check (say bigboobsofleeds.net) may use a firm called tzxt checks ltd, who deal with adult and non adult. Again, is the bank going to trace each check?

I do not see why any non UK site is even going to take notice of this.

And we have the problem of working out what porn is and is not.

Its also dishonest in what they are saying, as up to know they have stated they will only cover sites with films. So are they going to still only treat site with vids, in other words any site that is pics only or does not host films, still stay exempt, or will they now try to include these?

And what do they consider an age check?

One presumes they will expect the only real use is such as a credit card. By this you pay a $1 to access the site. One suspects that just saying you are 18 by clicking a box will not be sufficient.

Its unlikely that any tube site, or blog or indeed a forum will request people use a credit card to prove there age.

In reality what atvod are stating is simply not possible.

And as I have stated, do not think that a or you 18 box will be enough to satisfy atvod.

It is also wanting sites to get a licence. Do we believe this would be free? Of course not.

And if in the UK, atvod can do this, then surly the logic is other countries also will. So could we have a situation that if you run a blog, you may have to get (and pay for) a licence from every country in the world?

Are banks really going to be abel to deal with this? I would suspect most accounts are not in the sites name (ie, one would suspect that money generated from you as youporn does not get paid into an account called youporn).

It is suspected this is nothing to do with preventing under 18's accessing porn but more to do with atvod generating income.

If you run 200 sites, and 100 have age checks but 100 do not. All your sites are to promote a porn site (lets call it xxxxxxxx.net).

You make sales.

You get a check.

Will the banks now have to work out if the sales have come from the sites with the age check?

Will they stop payment as 100 of your sites comply and you state its only the 100 sites that comply that generated the sales.

Will banks request access to your affiliate passwords so they can log into your accounts and examine each sale?

Good. As long as they take it a step further and require British ISPs to all block free and pay porn sites who do not require verification. Otherwise the law leaves the free sites wide open and only punishes British businesses.

I'd love for free porn to be outlawed and if you're in this business and you don't think the same thing then you're nuts.

Dvtimes you are completely missing the point, this is not about webmasters receiving payments this is about members of the public joining porn sites. At the moment Adam if you want to join your favourite website Pierre Fitch at:
http://pierrefitch.com/tour/
you can do so. If Atvod have their way then your credit card or debit card would be blocked from being used on that site. Because of the video on the front page that gives you such a boner. Pete Johnson wants to restrict your freedom, that of a grown adult.....(ok maybe you're not the best example of that :)

I don't see many websites rewriting tours just to be able to accept UK members, maybe some of the bigger ones will test it. So what will you do DVT you will just go and jerk off at a free gay tube and Pierre Fitch's site will still have the video and any kid that's able to see it will still be able to see it.

But mom and pop up in their semi detached won't know that sort of detail, all they're see is a hero in Pete Johnson trying to protect their kids from porn, when in reality Pete Johnson knows that he is doing no such thing, he is knowingly misleading the public and giving them a false sense of security just to keep himself in a job and fund his pension. How can such an important issue as censorship of the internet be left to an organisation where 25% of all fees paid go to just one person ?

I think they are going to find a way to do that. Afterall this is what all the "noise" concerning this is about.. They want to see how to proceed.


Pornhub's so-called fan base is most the United States. Otherwise it would be blocked too. (And there is no sense in kidding anyone how they really make their money. )

I think the stupid fucking idiot parents are 100% at fault in this story.

Because they want to. Because sexuality doesn't start at age 18.
No one is forced to watch porn...

We live in the filty rotten excreta of 2000 years of Christianity.

UK :1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

One website alone - Pornhub - had been visited by 112,000 boys in the UK aged between 12 and 17-years-old

yeah, one was 12 and really only 112,000 17 year old boys watched porn.

Were they supposed to be in church?

What damage was done?

What problem is being solved?

Are the schools filled with sex crazed kids?

The Church State and parents had 2000 years to teach kids honestly about sex and failed...at least with porn they have a clue

Germany is going to get similar laws and I think that the execution is much more ahead there than in UK.