NICOSIA, Cyprus — Pornhub parent company Aylo will block access to its free video-sharing platforms in the United Kingdom starting Feb. 2 unless users have already set up accounts prior to that date, the company announced Tuesday.
Aylo explained in a statement, “New users in the UK will no longer be able to access Aylo’s content sharing platforms, including Pornhub, YouPorn, and Redtube. UK users who have verified their age will retain access through their existing accounts.”
During a press conference, Aylo VP Brand and Community Alexzandra Kekesi clarified, “You will have to use credentials to log in and access your account. Anyone who has not gone through that process prior to February will be redirected elsewhere. Their journey on our platform will start and end there.”
As XBIZ reported in June 2025, Aylo initially introduced age assurance methods that satisfied government rules under the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA). At the time, Kekesi called Ofcom’s model “the most robust in terms of actual and meaningful protection we’ve seen to date.”
During Tuesday’s press conference, however, Kekesi stated that Aylo now sees the OSA as a failure, with sites remaining “very accessible” to minors and traffic simply rerouting to noncompliant sites, making enforcement at scale impossible. She also noted that the vast majority of adult sites do not comply with the OSA and that the law raises “considerable privacy issues” and makes users vulnerable to data breaches.
“We can no longer participate in the flawed system that has been created in the UK as a result of the OSA,” Kekesi said.
Solomon Friedman, partner and VP for compliance at Ethical Capital Partners — which in 2023 acquired former Pornhub operator MindGeek and renamed the company Aylo — demonstrated during the press conference how easy it is for UK users to access adult content without age assurance. Friedman Googled “free porn” from a UK IP address to illustrate that while Pornhub requires user age verification, numerous other sites do not.
“As new sites continue to pop up that are noncompliant, they simply repopulate and move higher in the Google ranking,” Friedman said.
He added that sites not complying with age assurance requirements also tend not to comply with other laws, including those intended to prevent CSAM and intimate image abuse.
“This law by its very nature is pushing adults and children alike to the cesspools of the internet,” Friedman warned.
In jurisdictions where Pornhub has been required to implement age verification, the site has seen a drop in traffic of as much as 80%, as users seeking free content go elsewhere.
Friedman emphasized that U.K. media regulator Ofcom is “not the problem,” and said the agency has been working in good faith, consulting with the industry and taking its role seriously.
“You have a dedicated regulator working in good faith,” he said. “But unfortunately, the law they are operating under cannot possibly succeed.”
Friedman reiterated his company’s often-stated position that the only truly practical and effective option for keeping minors away from adult content is device-based age assurance.
“Microsoft, Apple and Google all have very robust built-in parental controls,” he pointed out. “Those are device-based controls that operate regardless of whether or not the site that is being accessed is compliant. The only thing needed is a mandate that these controls be activated by default.”
Currently, he noted, such controls are “opt-in, not opt-out.”
Friedman demonstrated how device-based controls such as Google’s SafeSearch can prevent minors from accessing adult content even if a VPN is being used, and called for big tech companies to “do the right thing proactively” or else “be forced to do the right thing by government.”
Asked during the press conference whether placing responsibility for age assurance on the big tech companies constituted passing the problem along to someone else, Friedman emphasized that the key issue is practicality.
“This is not a matter of shifting responsibility to anyone,” Friedman said. “When access is controlled at the device level, it’s efficient, it’s effective, it’s privacy-preserving, it gets the job done. It just works.
“Human behavior is why these laws are failing,” Friedman added. “Legislate not contrary to human behavior, but consistent with human behavior online — and that is at the device level.”
A rep told XBIZ that beyond the U.K., Aylo does still plan to participate in the European Commission’s pilot program for its “white label” age verification app.
