LOS ANGELES — Pornhub parent company Aylo has opted to block access to its sites in France rather than comply with age verification requirements under the country’s Security and Regulation of the Digital Space (SREN) law.
According to news site Euractiv, Aylo announced during a press conference Tuesday that Pornhub, as well as Aylo sites YouPorn and RedTube, would block French users starting Wednesday. Users visiting those sites will instead see the same type of message encountered by U.S. users in numerous states where Pornhub has blocked access due to age verification laws that it views as both privacy-compromising and ineffective.
News site France 24 quotes Solomon Friedman of Ethical Capital Partners, which owns Aylo, as telling reporters that displaying the message — which will include an image of French artist Eugène Delacroix’s iconic painting “Liberty Leading the People” — is Aylo’s way of telling the French people “how dangerous, how potentially privacy-infringing, and how ineffective the French law is.”
According to the France 24 report, Aylo exec Alex Kekesi told reporters that the company is “extremely pro the concept of age verification” but maintains that AV should be implemented at the operating system or device level.
In response to Aylo’s decision, France’s Digital Minister Clara Chappaz posted on X, “Adults are free to consume porn, but not at the expense of protecting our children. Asking pornographic sites to verify the age of their users is not about stigmatizing adults, but about protecting our children.
“If Aylo prefers to leave France than apply our laws, that’s up to them,” she added.
The French media regulator Arcom released a statement as well.
“The Aylo group has chosen to shirk the imperative of protecting minors by suspending access to its content in France, including for adults, even though there are numerous technical solutions on the market that allow users’ age to be verified while ensuring the protection of their personal data,” it reads in part.
Pornhub has recently been encountering friction from all sides in its European operations. As XBIZ reported last week, the European Commission recently initiated formal proceedings against Pornhub and three other sites for “suspected breaches” of the Digital Services Act (DSA). At the end of April, Germany’s Berlin Administrative Court upheld a “network ban” on both Pornhub and YouPorn for failing to comply with that country’s age verification regulations.
Aylo’s move comes in the wake of an Arcom statement detailing recent actions to enforce age verification rules as set forth under SREN, though the agency did not name any websites or providers involved.
SREN began rolling out measures in January and is now coming into full effect. Aylo is reportedly challenging provisions of the law in court.
