Three new pornographic sites have been notified by Arcom to prevent access to their content by minors, on pain of exposing themselves to a blocking of their service by the courts, according to a press release from the French audiovisual regulator published on Tuesday.
Arcom, which has been trying to complete a first blocking procedure targeting five sites for more than a year, this time targets companies Technius Ltd and Techpump Solutions SL for “one and two pornographic sites they publish respectively.”
According to the authority’s decisions, two of them are accessible after “a simple majority declaration that is enough to click on”, while a third “is not subject to any majority verification device”.
unprotected minors
The regulator also announced the referral to the president of the Paris Court of Justice against two new sites of the Cypriot company MG Freesites, owned by the world leader in porn Mindgeek (recently acquired by a Canadian fund) and publisher of the Pornhub platform.
At the end of 2021, Arcom had launched a first series of summons against five sites (Pornhub, Tukif, Xhamster, Xvideos and Xnxx), summoned to comply with the legal obligation to effectively block minors’ access to their content.
The criminal code prohibits exposing minors to pornographic photos and videos and the law on domestic violence of July 30, 2020 specifies that the affected companies cannot exonerate themselves from their responsibilities simply by asking an Internet user if they are older.
A solution to find
The next public hearing in this case will take place on Thursday in Paris, after the rejection by the Court of Cassation of a priority question of constitutionality presented by MG Freesites and the failure of mediation between the publishers mentioned and Arcom.
The government wants to bring this legal battle to fruition this year and is working on implementing a technical solution for age verification called “double anonymity”, in order to respond to the arguments of sites that say they do not have a satisfactory solution to verify the age of your visitors.
Meanwhile, the Cnil, guardian of the privacy of the French, has ruled in favor of the use of other systems, such as age validation through payment card or analysis of facial features.
Source: BFM TV
