Arcom continues to wage its battle for the protection of minors on the Internet, with pornographic sites in its sights. Checking the age of Internet users is still a problem.
Three new pornographic sites have been given formal notice by Arcom to prevent access to their content by minors, under penalty of exposing themselves to a blocking of their service by the courts, according to a statement of the French audiovisual regulator published on Tuesday.
Arcom, which has been trying for more than a year to complete a first blocking procedure targeting five sites, this time targets the companies Technius Ltd and Techpump Solutions SL for “respectively one and two pornographic sites that they publish”.
According to the decisions of the authority, two of them are accessible after “a simple declaration of majority on which it is enough to click”, while a third “is not subject to any verification device of the majority “.
Unprotected minors
The regulator also announced the referral to the President of the Paris Court of Justice against two new sites from the Cypriot company MG Freesites, owned by the world porn leader Mindgeek (recently acquired by a Canadian fund) and publisher of the Pornhub platform.
At the end of 2021, Arcom had launched a first series of formal notices against five sites (Pornhub, Tukif, Xhamster, Xvideos and Xnxx), summoned to comply with the legal obligation to effectively block access by minors to their content.
The penal code prohibits exposing minors to pornographic photos and videos and the law on domestic violence of July 30, 2020 specifies that the companies concerned cannot exonerate themselves from their responsibilities by simply asking an Internet user if he is major.
A solution to find
The next public hearing in this case is to be held Thursday in Paris, after the rejection by the Court of Cassation of a priority question of constitutionality filed by MG Freesites and the failure of mediation between the targeted publishers and Arcom.
The government wants to bring this legal battle to a successful conclusion this year and is working on the implementation of a technical solution for age verification called “double anonymity”, in order to respond to the arguments of sites which say they have no solution. satisfactory to verify the age of their visitors.
In the meantime, the Cnil, guardian of the privacy of the French, has declared itself in favor of the use of other systems, such as the validation of age by the payment card or the analysis of facial features.
