LOS ANGELES — Pornhub parent company Aylo plans to participate in the European Commission’s pilot program for its “white label” age verification app, a spokesperson for the company has confirmed.
German tech news site Netzpolitik first reported the news, and an Aylo spokesperson has since confirmed the plan to XBIZ.
"We are testing as part of the commission's app," the spokesperson said. "We continue to believe such a solution can be effective if it is deployed on an industry-wide basis, adopted by a critical mass of users in the EU, and supported by a consistent enforcement environment that can effectively prevent the migration of users to non-compliant sites. As such, we are actively supporting the Commission’s deployment of its privacy-respecting white label age verification app."
The description of the white-label AV app as "privacy-respecting" suggests that its specific features made Aylo more amenable to participating in the program. 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.”
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.
