BERLIN — Pornhub parent company Aylo plans to participate in the European Commission’s pilot program for its “white label” age verification app, according to a report by German tech news site Netzpolitik.
The site quotes an Aylo spokesperson as saying that the company is one of the first participants in the program.
The European Commission made the white-label AV app public in July, with the aim of helping sites and platforms comply with its guidelines for protecting minors online under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). During the app’s pilot phase, it is being tried out in the EU member states of Denmark, France, Greece, Italy and Spain.
As XBIZ reported in November, Italian media regulator AGCOM is requiring that age verification systems accommodate use of the white-label app and has included Aylo sites Pornhub, YouPorn and Redtube on a preliminary list of high-traffic adult sites to which its new AV regulations apply.
Other EU member states have also been pressuring Pornhub to implement age verification. In France, after much legal back-and-forth, Aylo opted to block French users rather than comply with the country’s AV requirements. In Germany, a court has temporarily blocked an order forcing telecom providers to cut off access to Aylo-owned adult sites Pornhub and YouPorn over AV noncompliance — but media regulators are still expected to leverage new rules prohibiting financial institutions from providing payment services to adult sites deemed to have inadequate age verification systems.
Aylo’s legal battles in those countries have largely centered around the question of whether individual EU nations have jurisdiction when it comes to AV requirements. In September, however, an advocate general of the European Union’s Court of Justice advised the court, in a nonbinding legal opinion, to rule that France can require pornographic websites based in other EU states to implement age verification in accordance with French law. A final decision is pending. Meanwhile, the European Commission earlier this year announced plans to conduct a study to determine how well Pornhub and other high-traffic adult sites are complying with the DSA.
It is unclear whether such mounting pressure has motivated Aylo to work more closely with the EU — or whether the specific features of the EU app made it more amenable to compromise. Unlike most attempts to enforce age verification in the United States, the Commission's AV guidelines specify “non-intrusiveness” as an important criterion. Likewise, when Aylo announced in June that it would comply with age assurance rules under the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act, a company rep called Ofcom’s model “the most robust in terms of actual and meaningful protection we’ve seen to date.”
Netzpolitik reports that Aylo declined to specify exactly when Pornhub plans to introduce the app for EU users. XBIZ has reached out to Aylo for comment.
