Arcom (ex-CSA) asks the Paris court to block connections to several pornographic sites, due to the lack of an age verification device.
Representatives of five of the most visited pornographic sites strongly opposed Thursday before the Paris Court of Justice to the blocking request initiated by Arcom, which is trying to enforce the legal obligation to prevent access to their content. by minors.
At the end of a hearing of nearly 4 hours, during which the lawyers of the publishing companies of the sites Pornhub, Tukif, XHamster, Xvideos and Xnxx presented requests for nullity of the procedure and a stay of proceedings, the court placed his decision under advisement on July 7.
No technical modality
These companies – including MG Freesites, which publishes the Pornhub platform, domiciled in Cyprus and belonging to the world leader in porno Mindgeek, or Web Group Czech, which publishes Xvideos and Xnxx, founded by the French Stéphane Pacaud – refuse to set up an age verification because they consider the law insufficiently clear on the expected technical modalities. To date, there is no consensus on any technical solution for age verification that is effective and respectful of personal data.
Despite the rejection of these reasons by the Court of Cassation in January, they are still demanding the publication by Arcom, the French audiovisual and digital policeman, of “guidelines” and regret not having been concerned by experimenting with a mechanism recently announced by the government for implementation in September.
Beyond that, they claim that Arcom did not correctly notify its intention to take blocking measures to the European authorities, as required by a Community directive.
The publication of guidelines is “a trap in which the sites want to embark us. We are fighting so that it does not take place”, declared to AFP Thomas Rohmer, founder of Open, one of the protection associations of childhood which had seized the regulator at the end of 2021.
Access to pornographic content by minors can, he says, be prevented by switching to a paid business model. For Arcom lawyer Nicolas Jouanin, these new site requests are “obviously dilatory”.
“In this case, everything is done to make an extremely simple legal issue as complex as possible,” he pleaded. “The sites have taken this procedure hostage, it’s been dragging on for months.”
According to him, “Arcom is not here censoring pornography” but is trying to “put an end to a serious disturbance of public order”. According to Médiamétrie’s Global Internet Audience measurement, in the 1st quarter of 2022, all sites porno recorded a cumulative average monthly audience of 18.3 million unique visitors in France, of which 12% were minors (i.e. more than 2.2 million).
Three feminist associations (Osez le féminisme, Les Effronté es and the Mouvement du Nid) also filed a complaint in November against the Pornhub platform for “dissemination of child pornography images and violent messages of a pornographic nature, accessible to minors”. Present at the hearing, they withdrew their request to intervene so as not to slow down the procedure.
On Tuesday, Arcom announced a new salvo of formal notices targeting 3 pornographic sites and the launch of legal proceedings against 2 other platforms belonging to MG Freesites.
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.
