Regulator Has Plan to Withhold Revenue from Non-UK Porn Sites

UNITED KINGDOM—UK online regulator Atvod held what it called a “very positive meeting” yesterday with British banks, the UK Card Association and other payment processors to discuss what should be done about foreign (i.e. non-U.K.) porn sites that fail to comply with the 1964 Obscene Publications Act, which prohibits sites from “offering uncensored sample clips without age checks,” according to cityam.com. Of course, Atvod already has an answer to the question, which it also posed earlier this year, whether it can be right "for businesses which are likely to be operating illegally to draw revenues from UK bank and credit card accounts." Atvod wants to make the withholding of those revenues the official policy of the British government. The bold effort by the video-on-demand co-regulator is being challenged by the Open Rights Group, whose Jim Killock said, “This is something that parliament should debate and decide on. It shouldn’t be obscure subcommittees telling banks how to behave in order to decide what UK customers may or may not access. "Whether these sites should be operating in the way that they do is another matter,” he added. “But the consequences might be quite bizarre—you don't know whether this is actually going to tackle the problem. That's what democratic processes are about: deciding whether you've got the evidence to act." Whether the democratic process will kick in remains to be seen, but in the meantime the effort to implement what has morphed from a “plan” to a “proposal” appears to be gaining steam as the requisite parties meet behind closed doors to discuss the disruptive solution. “Under the proposal,” reports cityam.com, “UK banks and card providers will be obliged to block payments to websites that provide sample video clips of regulated content—such as pornography—outside a paywall to encourage new customers to subscribe. Parliament has not approved the plan, which regulator Atvod says falls within its existing remit to regulate video-on-demand in the domestic market. “The plan,” it adds, “would see UK banks banned from handling payments to foreign websites offering such publicly available content, regardless of which country the provider is based in or where their servers are hosted.” Expect this plan to gain traction as British Prime Minister David Cameron’s campaign to impose semi-mandatory filters at the ISP level is either blocked or ultimately unsuccessful in its goal of keeping Britain’s youth protected behind a national firewall.