Pornhub Site and two other pornographic sites risk being shut down by French Authorities for allowing minors access to their platforms.
According to the report by AFP, the French audiovisual regulatory authority has threatened to shut down the sites following this complaint and others.
The sites listed as those at risk of being shut down and out of business according to AFP reports are Pornhub, Tukif, Xhamster, Xvideo, Xnxx who have all been ordered by the Superior Audiovisual Council (CSA) to prevent their access to minors, according to the formal notices published Monday on the regulator’s site.
In the event of failure to comply with this obligation within 15 days, the sites run the risk of their access being blocked. They are particularly accused of posting a simple warning message, considered insufficient to protect the youngest.
“The regulator ensures, in accordance with the law, its mission of protecting minors. (…) With these decisions, we appeal to the responsibility of the operators who must put in place the necessary measures to prevent the access of minors to their content, “the CSA told AFP.
This decision is the result of a decree published on October 7 by the government. The text allows the CSA to close access to pornographic sites as soon as it is informed by a third party (individual or association ) that they allow minors to access their content. What is prohibited by article 227-24 of the penal code.
As mentioned by many specialists, this period of fifteen days may not be sufficient to leave the possibility for platforms to better regulate access to their content, the report by AFP had stated.
To date, no technical solution is in fact available to verify the age of an Internet user with certainty and without putting their personal data at risk. The companies concerned are also based abroad, without a representative in France.
Among the five sites put on notice, Pornhub site and Xhamster, established in Cyprus, belong to the porn giant MindGeek, also the owner of YouPorn, which is legally domiciled in Luxembourg.
Xvideos and Xnxx are installed in the Czech Republic and Tukif in Portugal.
According to the procedure allowed by the decree of October, the CSA can after two weeks force internet service providers to block the targeted sites in order to redirect Internet users to the French regulator’s site.
Such an operation, based on the modification of DNS, the directory responsible for transforming a site’s URL address into an IP address, can however easily be bypassed.