PARIS — French billionaire Xavier Niel, founder of telecommunications giant Iliad S.A., ignited a heated debate this week when he appeared to admit that the no-cost VPN his Free Mobile wireless carrier has integrated into its service was deliberately designed to circumvent age verification restrictions and allow customers to access adult content.
The company launched the service — and revealed that it existed — this past Tuesday. Dubbed Free mVPN, it is automatically included with several of the carrier's subscription tiers. Free Mobile claims that it is the first mobile carrier to ever include a free consumer VPN in its core mobile network.
Niel, who's been described as "the Richard Branson of France" and has a very colorful origin story, framed the surprise feature launch as a gift to his fellow countrymen.
"A VPN should not be a luxury reserved for a select few," he said in a statement. "Once again, Free is giving purchasing power back to the French people."
It also happened to arrive right in the middle of the country's protracted back-and-forth legal tussle over age verification. Between the time France first proposed, in 2022, its Law Aiming to Secure and Regulate the Digital Space, and when it was actually passed in late 2023, it faced multiple legal challenges, was accused of selectively targeting specific websites, and was even openly described by one French senator as being more about "complicat[ing] the life of publishers of porn sites" than anything having to do with age verification or online safety.
Since its passing, there has been a tug-of-war in the French courts over whether the law would force sites based outside the country to comply with its restrictions. The law was suspended for non-French E.U.-based sites this past June; reinstated in July; and then utilized by French regulator Arcom in August against five non-French websites, two of which subsequently challenged the ruling in France's highest court. Just yesterday, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar of the E.U. Court of Justice handed down a requested, non-binding opinion to the French court advising it to rule that they can require pornographic websites based in other E.U. states to implement age verification in accordance with French law.
So, whether it was deliberate or merely serendipitous, Free Mobile integrating a no-cost VPN onto its customers' mobile devices this week times out well for those who may want to visit popular adult websites that could decide to simply geoblock their service in France, as Pornhub already has, should the ruling not go their way. VPN usage has already ticked markedly upward since age verification was implemented, so there is a documented market for the service.
That fact was not lost on one French tech website, which posted Tuesday on X.com, "Free Mobile includes a free VPN, which incidentally allows users to bypass anti-pornography blocking."
To which Niel replied in a post of his own, simply, "Par hasard" — a French expression that literally translates to "By chance," but is used in a similar way as someone sarcastically saying "Surprise, surprise..."
This was universally accepted across France as an admission that the mVPN service was at least partially designed specifically to allow Free Mobile's users to access adult content from outside the country without having to pay for a VPN subscription. It's how Thierry Sother, a Socialist Party member of the French National Assembly, interpreted it.
Yesterday, Sother reported mVPN to Arcom, posting his complaint on his BlueSky profile.
"On Tuesday, September 16, the company Free, a French mobile telephone operator and one of the main internet access providers in France, announced the launch of a VPN service integrated directly into the Free mobile network and accessible at no additional cost, without installing a third-party application, to all subscribers who have subscribed to the Free 5G Package and Free Series offers," the complaint reads. It goes on to call out the company for trying to deliberately circumvent the country's age verification law to the benefit of non-French adult websites, saying that mVPN "directly threatens compliance with the legal obligations imposed, for this purpose, on certain companies."
As of publication, neither Niel nor Arcom have publicly responded to Sother's complaint.
