PARIS — New details surfaced today about a French media regulatory agency's plan to block all major free adult sites in the country, in response to a controversial age verification law.
The details emerged in the course of a discussion held in the French Senate, during which one senator proposed treating consensual, legal adult content like terrorism or pedophilia.
Representatives of ARCOM, a recently-formed agency that superseded former regulatory agency CSA, an analog of the American FCC, explained that due to a procedural error by the agency's lawyers, a hearing scheduled for May 24 to decide whether to block Pornhub, xHamster, XNXX, Tukif and XVideos had to be postponed until Sept. 6.
It also came to light that politicians had “considered the curious idea of replacing the homepage of ‘porn sites’ with a black screen to verify ages,” Marc Rees, of French tech news site Next INpact, reported today. Rees is the main journalist tracking ongoing threats by the Emmanuel Macron government to censor many of the most popular adult tube sites.
Several French senators proposed theoretical schemes for verifying user age online. However, their suggestions demonstrated absolute ignorance of longstanding debates about age verification and content moderation, requiring the ARCOM regulators to patiently explain why the ideas were impractical or illegal.
The Aftermath of a Controversial Law
As XBIZ reported, France’s age-verification mandate was surreptitiously added to a hastily approved domestic violence law during an atypical and sparsely attended COVID-era session of the French Parliament in July 2020.
The law specifies that adult companies should be required to institute measures beyond simply asking an internet user whether they are of age. It also empowers a government official — the president of ARCOM — to demand that the president of the judicial court order ISP providers to immediately block infringing sites in the entire country.
According to Rees, Pornhub is in the process of filing a challenge to the controversial law’s constitutionality, based on the legislators’ vagueness in drafting it, which violates the legal principle of “freedom of expression and communication.”
ARCOM’s General Director Guillaume Blanchot explained that his regulatory agency was also now bound by external “procedural constraints” due to France’s membership in the EU.
“Because of the application of the ‘country of origin’ principle, which is enshrined in the ecommerce directive,” Blanchot noted, “we must not only inform the Member State where most of the sites are established of the procedure we are undertaking, and ask them whether they intend to take action against them itself; but also, at the same time, we must inform the European Commission.”
This process, Blanchot added, “requires a number of information guarantees and procedures, which make it longer than we could wish.”
Senator: Treat Porn Like 'Terrorism' and 'Pedophilia'
According to Rees’ reporting, during the senate roundtable, VP of the Senate Laurence Rossignol floated the idea of “treating pornographic sites as pedophile sites or sites that glorify terrorism” in order to implement “an administrative blockage, without the intervention of the judge.”
Blanchot then clarified for the senator that while terrorism and pedophilia are illegal in all cases, pornography is most certainly legal for adults.
The confessedly tech-ignorant senators also suggested a vague scheme of “replacing the home pages of XXX sites with a black screen, until the internet user presents a bank card to pay for this access.”
The ARCOM representative pointed out that “it is not possible to force porn sites to set up paid default access,” or for the state to mandate that their business model be exclusively paywalled paysites.