Pornhub has announced it is partially quitting the UK as a result of the Online Safety Act.
Parent company Aylo said users will need to sign up and verify their ID if they want to continue accessing content on the website, as well as on YouPorn and RedTube.
Users will need to go through this age assurance process before a February 2 cut-off date.
After that date, any site visitor looking to access Pornhub will be met by ‘a wall’ instead of the website homepage.
Aylo said a ‘failure’ of the Online Safety Act means visitors are flocking to sites that are non-compliant to age verification laws.
In October, Aylo said the law change had caused traffic to the website to fall by 77 per cent.
Alex Kekesi, head of community and brand at Aylo, said it had been a ‘difficult decision’ to restrict access to the UK’s largest porn platform.
She said: ‘Our sites, which host legal and regulated porn, will no longer be available in the UK to new users, but thousands of irresponsible porn sites will still be easy to access.’
She said the company ‘wanted to believe that… Ofcom could take poor legislation and manage to enforce compliance in a meaningful way’.
But six months later she said the company’s experience ‘strongly suggests that the OSA has failed to achieve that objective’.
Solomon Friedman of Ethical Capital Partners (ECP), which owns Aylo, said the problem was not ‘Ofcom’ but ‘the law’.
Friedman added: ‘You have a dedicated regulator working in good faith, but unfortunately, the law they are operating under cannot possibly succeed.’
He continued: ‘This law, not our regulator, this law by its very nature is pushing both adults and children alike to the cesspools of the internet, to the most dangerous material possible.’
An Ofcom spokesperson said: ‘Porn services have a choice between using age checks to protect users as required under the Act, or to block access to their sites in the UK.
‘There’s nothing to stop technology providers from developing solutions which work at the device level, and we would urge the industry to get on with that if they can evidence it is highly effective.
‘Our job is to enforce the rules as they stand. We’ve put in place age assurance rules that are flexible and proportionate, and we have seen widespread adoption.
‘We’ve taken strong and swift action against non-compliance, launching investigations into more than 80 porn sites and fining a porn provider £1million, with more to come.
“We will continue our dialogue with Aylo to understand this change to its position.
‘Any changes to the law around device-based age assurance is a matter for Government.’
Metro has contacted the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology for comment.
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