LONDON — Friday, July 25 marks U.K. media regulator Ofcom’s deadline for user-to-user services such as tube, cam and fan sites to implement its requisite “highly effective age assurance” measures for preventing minors from viewing adult content.
Other types of adult sites, such as studios and paysites, have already fallen under the rules of the Online Safety Act (OSA), which Ofcom is charged with enforcing.
“Today we are extending our existing age assurance enforcement program — previously focused on studio porn services — to cover all platforms that allow users to share pornographic material, whether they are dedicated adult sites or other services that include pornography,” Ofcom announced in a statement issued Thursday. “We will be actively checking compliance from 25 July and, should it be necessary, we expect to launch any investigations into individual services next week. These would add to 11 Ofcom investigations already in progress.”
“Ofcom is ready to enforce against any company which allows pornographic content and does not comply with age-check requirements by the deadline,” the statement warns.
Concurrently, Pornhub parent company Aylo reaffirmed on Thursday that it is introducing age assurance methods that Ofcom “deems capable of being highly effective in the United Kingdom,” including email-based age estimation, credit card age checks, mobile network operator age checks and open banking.
“Ofcom has consulted with industry stakeholders and has presented a variety of flexible methods of age assurance that are less intrusive than we have seen in other jurisdictions, giving us the confidence to operate within their framework,” stated Aylo VP Brand and Community Alex Kekesi.
As XBIZ reported in June, Aylo has praised Ofcom for how it has been handling implementation of the new rules, though the company continues to advocate for device-based age verification as the most effective solution.
Issuance of guidelines and enforcement actions under the OSA have been slowly ramping up since the law took effect in 2023. Ofcom released its age assurance guidelines in January and has performed various forms of outreach to make information available to adult sites and platforms to enable compliance with the OSA.
In April, the agency stated that providers of online pornography were already implementing age assurance across “thousands of sites” accessible in the U.K. in response to Ofcom’s OSA enforcement program.
