The Montreal offices of Pornhub parent company MindGeek, which was renamed Aylo last month. The company's owner, Private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners, is appealing new laws in Germany requiring age verification to stop explicit content being watched by people under the age of 18.Christinne Muschi/The Globe and Mail
German media regulators are poised to ban porn sites owned by a Canadian private equity company over its failure to comply with the country’s laws on age verification to stop explicit content being watched by under-18s.
German regulators say they are preparing to get the country’s internet providers to block Pornhub, YouPorn and MyDirtyHobby, owned by Ethical Capital Partners, over its failure to comply with German law.
The media authority of North Rhine-Westphalia says the company has ignored its repeated calls to comply with German law on the protection of minors which requires pornography online to have an age verification system.
The issue has been before the German courts for years and the regulator accused the company of ignoring court rulings.
Dr. Tobias Schmid, director of Landesanstalt für Medien NRW, the media authority of North Rhine-Westphalia, said its next step would be to involve the telecom industry, such as Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom, to block access. He said Pornhub and the other Canadian-owned sites without age verification could be shut down by the end of October unless they comply.
Pornhub has more than 100 million views per month in Germany, he estimated, and research shows that around a third of children 12 and up have been confronted with porn, sometimes being shown it by friends.
Solomon Friedman of Ethical Capital Partners said it was appealing in the German courts and legal proceedings were continuing. He said the company is in favour of age verification “at a device level.”
He said asking people wanting to access porn for government ID, a photo and birthdate raised privacy concerns and drove people who did not want to provide such details to less-regulated sites.
The media regulator said German porn companies have introduced age verification while the Canada-owned sites are failing to comply. It accused Ethical Capital Partners of ignoring court orders and said its legal appeals do not mean it does not have to comply with German law.
In April the Dusseldorf Administrative Court confirmed a previous decision against Pornhub, YouPorn and MyDirtyHobby, it said.
The media authority has issued notices to MindGeek – whose name was changed to Aylo last month – which operates the porn sites. It says it now plans to “initiate further proceedings against the illegal distribution of pornographic content by Ethical Capital Partners websites.”
“After three clear decisions by German courts in favour of youth media protections … we will now intervene with internet service providers directly in order to technically prevent the illegal distribution of freely accessible pornography,” the German regulator said in a briefing paper.
The action is being closely watched in Ottawa where senators and MPs have been trying to introduce age verification to access Pornhub and similar sites in Canada.
Last year, senators passed an amendment to the online streaming bill to require age verification for explicit content but it was not accepted by Pablo Rodriguez, then heritage minister. He hinted that the forthcoming online safety bill may contain such a measure.
A private member’s bill, presented by Quebec Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, has now passed the Senate and is before the House of Commons, sponsored by Conservative MP Karen Vecchio.
The proposed Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act would make it an offence, with fines up to $500,000, to make sexually explicit material available to a young person on the internet.
Pornhub owner MindGeek acquired by Ottawa-based private equity firm
Ariane Joazard-Bélizaire, spokeswoman for Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge, said the government was reviewing the bill.
Ms. Miville-Dechêne, says she was delighted that Germany was taking “concrete action to enforce its age-verification law.”
“Pornhub and other porn sites cannot continue to flout the rules with impunity. Germany, France, the U.K. and several U.S. states have already adopted or are in the process of adopting age-verification laws,” she said. “Protecting kids from online porn is not a partisan issue and Bill S-210 has already cleared the Senate. The federal government should immediately support this legislation.”
In a statement Aylo said it “has publicly supported age verification of users for years.” But it says any law on this issue must preserve user privacy.
“The law proposed in Germany, for example, would require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information. Moreover, it is entirely ineffective as experience has demonstrated that individuals will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws.”
It said that after age verification was introduced in January in Louisiana, Pornhub’s traffic there dropped by around 80 per cent.
“These people did not stop looking for porn. They just migrated to darker corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age, that don’t follow the law, that don’t take user safety seriously, and that often don’t even moderate content,” it said.