The next battle facing the Internet will be the war against pornography. In Europe, Pedro Sánchez presented with great fanfare an application to restrict access to porn; Months later, the details of how it will work and the possible consequences it could have on the Internet and the porn industry are not yet finalized. In the meantime, the neighboring country has taken a tougher decision, which will have immediate effect.
The Paris Court of Appeal today ordered complete blocking of nine pornographic pagesbelieving that they did not take sufficient precautions to prevent access to content reserved for adults. According to reports The World
To reach this decision, the Court had to consider the importance of fundamental rights such as freedom of expression or communicati on; However, the decision alleges that the protection of minors is above these rights
The Court considers that the reported pages did not do enough to prevent the entry of minors, by simply implementing a warning window which the user can easily ignore. The judgment does not indicate exactly the method to be used to identify users and verify that they are of legal age; However, this week Arcom, France’s main telecommunications regulator, published a technical reference for age verification on pornographic sites, which includes biometric methods among other things.
Not all pornographic sites will be affected by this court decision. Specifically, services operating outside the European Union, such as xHamster, TuKif, IciPorno and others, have only 15 days from today to apply “effective” changes to their control pages. ‘age. In the event of non-compliance with the sentence, the court ordered the country’s teleoperators to start nationwide site blocking.
On the other hand, many of the most popular services, such as Pornhub, Youporn or XVIdeos will not be blocked for the momentsince the responsible companies are based in the European Union. For this reason, the Court considers that we must first await a key decision from the Court of Justice of the European Union, which must still examine a series of preliminary questions posed by the Council of State in a similar case.
A similar situation could arise in Europe following a new comprehensive law aimed at blocking content considered “inappropriate”, which, in addition to blocking pornographic sites, could also be used to limit the access of minors to networks social. Due to the possible consequences on freedom of communication and the possible tracking of users who consume pornography, the government’s solution consists of an application that does not obtain personal data, but rather generates a digital certificate that It only certifies that the user is over 18 years old. The use of this application would be mandatory on all pages examined by the National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC), at the risk of being blocked in Europe.
