New UK Anti-Porn Law Still Leaves Plenty Of Porn Available Online

Last year, the United Kingdom passed a new law that would impose heavy fines on porn sites that failed to verify their users' ages, using software to make sure that no one under 18 could access the adult content they offer. But though the new restrictions were scheduled to be put in place in April, the law still has not taken effect. Moreover, new guidelines for implementing the new system have only raised new questions, according to a report this week by Britain’s Guardian newspaper. In what may be good news for porn fans but bad news for advocates of the new planned restrictions, the guidelines allow exemptions for sites whose content is less than one-third porn, and which do not charge fees for access. That loophole would exempt social media platforms such as Twitter and the online forum Reddit which contain plenty of explicit pornographic content—but not enough to exceed the limit of one-third of all content on the vast platforms. “They haven’t explained how they define percentage. Are they going to count the number of pixels on the screen? What’s a third? It’s very wide and arbitrary and very difficult to define," Jim Killock, director of the Open Rights Group, which opposed the planned restrictions, told The Guardian. "It shows the underlying problem. They are not trying to catch everything, they are not trying to remove all porn, only some. And when that’s combined with fines and blocking of content—and therefore targeting users as well as companies—you end up with a policy that’s pretty incoherent.” Privacy issues have also posed significant concerns about the new U.K. law. Users would be required to upload their personal data and identity information to verify their ages—information could be exposed or misused online, as AVN.com has reported. While the new guidelines propose a system for protecting user data, the guidelines also make the system voluntary, meaning that age-verification companies can choose whether to follow those rules or not. Which is kind of crazy,” Killock told the site The Verge. “It means the government has basically conceded [that privacy is threatened], but regulators won’t be able to do anything about it.” The U.K.'s Minister for Digital and the Creative Industries, Margot James, told the British parliament last week that she expects the new anti-porn law will face legal challenges that could cost the U.K. taxpayer up to £10 million, or $13 million, in its first year alone. Photo by WillVision/Wikimedia Commons