DÜSSELDORF, Germany — Tobias Schmid, the obscure local bureaucrat who spearheads Germany’s War on Porn and recently led a successful movement to force ISPs to ban xHamster in the country, gave an interview last week in which he admitted he has “no clear answer” on how to make age verification effective and acknowledged his anti-porn crusade is “a bit Kafkaesque.”
The recorded interview, originally published by online publication Übermedien last Friday under the headline ”Is There Any Point in Blocking Porn Portals Like xHamster?” was substantially excerpted by German tech news site Netzpolitik.org.
Schmid, a conservative politician and currently a local media regulator as Head of the State Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia, confessed that he “wants to prevent a cat-and-mouse game with xHamster” and other adult platforms by finding ways to “turn off the operators' money supply instead of blocking [each] site,” Übermedien reported.
A Gang-Bang Obsession and Vagueness About Implementation
Schmid claimed to be committed to freedom of expression, but quickly clarified that he views such freedom as limited to what he considers “opinion formation.”
In Schmid’s view, xHamster — Germany's most-visited porn site, according to Netzpolitik — is not "opinion-forming content in the classic sense."
“I'm not quite sure whether the optically intense depiction of gang-bang is so incredibly relevant to opinion-forming,” he added, referring to the group sex act that he has obsessed over for years in his condemnation of tube sites.
When the interviewer brought up the intricacies of deciding what kind of access to sexual information people should have through puberty, or from whom, or whether an average teen could easily bypass national blocks with VPNs or by other methods, Schmid became more vague.
"No, I don't have a clear answer on how to master” more complex issues of age verification, he admitted.
Netzpolitik’s Sebastian Meineck, who has provided detailed reports on Schmid’s one-man War on Porn in Germany, reported that he “is currently in contact with colleagues in Cyprus, where xHamster is based, to discuss how to proceed,” after the tube site moved its content to a slightly different URL to sidestep the legal block.
Schmid, however, is undaunted by the prospect of an endless game of “whack-a-hamster.”
“It seems a bit Kafkaesque,” the man described by colleagues as having “a fetish for order” told Übermedien about his long-term mission. “And maybe it is in some ways.”