Age Verification for All “Pornographic” Websites – UK Government

What is happening with Age Verification on “Pornographic” websites?

As you’ll be aware (since you’re reading our blog!) Affordable Leather Products makes Leather Bondage and BDSM Gear for the adult market, something we’ve been doing for over 20 years.

Unfortunately, during that time, we’ve seen many “Won’t someone think of the children?” attempts to clamp down on websites which provide “pornographic” material and the latest one is from the Government’s Digital Economy Bill (pdf) which contains the following requirement:

15 Internet pornography: requirement to prevent access by persons under the age of 18

(1) A person must not make pornographic material available on the internet on a commercial basis to persons in the United Kingdom except in a way that secures that, at any given time, the material is not normally accessible by persons under the age of 18.

(2) For the purposes of this Part, making pornographic material available on the internet on a commercial basis includes making it available on the internet free of charge—

(a) on or via an internet site which is operated on a commercial basis, or
(b) via any other means of accessing the internet which is operated or provided on a commercial basis.

It goes on with a definition which includes:

any other material if it is reasonable to assume from its nature—
(i) that it was produced solely or principally for the purposes of sexual arousal, and
(ii) that any classification certificate issued for a video work including it would be an 18 certificate.

Now, since we are a business, we are operating “on a commercial basis” and, of course, our products could be considered to be “for sexual arousal”.

Also, very probably, if anyone made a video that included any of our products, it would be an 18 certificate and this would also certainly include many websites that feature Professional Dommes and other such practitioners.

Failing to have such Age Verification in place could result in a fine up of to £250,000 or 5% of a business’ turnover.

[bctt tweet=”‘Pornographic’ websites could be fined £250,000 if they don’t have Age Verification”]

But there are two fundamental problems with this:

1) It only affects UK websites, so any hosted in Europe or the USA or, indeed, anywhere else in the world will not need to comply and:

2) How will such verification be implemented? The usual suggestion is that someone will have to provide a credit card number to get access, but the fact of the matter is that many people won’t want to do this, simply because of the risk of their details being used fraudulently.

Hasn’t Age Verification for Adult Material been tried before?

Yes, it has. Back in the old days of the 0898 Premium Rate phone numbers, it was decided that to protect children and stop them accessing adult content, all BT phone lines would have a block put on these (perfectly legal) services unless the subscriber contacted the phone company and asked for that block to be removed.

Naturally, very few people were willing to phone up and say “Please let me have access to the naughty phone lines”, so revenue for legitimate businesses suddenly plummetted and a lot of them went out of business before this ridiculous requirement was scrapped.

[bctt tweet=”Age verification nearly destroyed 0898 adult phone line businesses in the 1980s”]

What can I do about stopping this law coming into effect?

Contact your MP. Go to the website Write to them and find your MPs details, then send them an e-mail explaining that you are a legitimate producer and provider of adult material and that you don’t want your business crippled by an ill thought out and badly written law which will only affect businesses in the UK and cannot do anything to prevent teenagers accessing non-UK material.

You can also remind them that the responsibility for the safety and well being of any children who might try to access your site falls on their parents, not on you.

Finally you could remind your MP that the Dutch have a much more open minded attitude towards such things, including introducing Sex Education into schools from a much younger age that ours do, yet, despite this, they have lower levels of teenage pregnancy and sexual offences because their children are taught, amongst other things, that pornography is not reality and it’s not a “how to” guide.

Education, not legislation, should be the way of dealing with this issue and ones like it.

[bctt tweet=”Education, not legislation, should be how we deal with teenagers accessing adult material”]

Are you an adult website owner or operator and will this affect you?

Are you concerned that this proposed law is going to affect your business? Are you unsure as to whether your site is going to be included in the government’s broad and vague description of what is “pornographic”?

Post your thoughts in the comments.