Pornhub will ban new users in the UK starting next week to protest ‘flawed’ ID law

Pornhub is blocked The company on Tuesday announced the same in the UK on February 2, arguing that the country’s age verification laws are ineffective.

Starting February 2, only users who have already registered with Pornhub and completed age verification will be able to access the site. New users will not be able to register.

The move comes after a new set of provisions aimed at preventing minors from viewing pornography were implemented last July, requiring adults to undergo facial scans to estimate age, upload identity documents, verify credit cards, and more, in order to verify that they are not minors.

Pornhub said traffic from UK users dropped by 77 percent after the start of the Internet Safety Act.

But in a presentation on Tuesday, the company said many porn sites did not comply with the laws, rendering them useless.

“We believe we can no longer participate in the flawed system that exists in the UK as a result of the Online Safety Act,” says Alex Kekesi, vice president of brand and community at Pornhub.

“Our sites, which host legal and regulated pornography, will no longer be available in the UK to new users, but thousands of irresponsible porn sites will remain easily accessible,” the company noted in a press release.

Solomon Friedman, vice president of compliance for private equity firm Ethical Partners Capital (ECP), which owns Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo, made a presentation during the presentation showing that six out of 10 Google results for “free porn” in the UK do not comply with age verification laws.

“ECP does not want a single minor to be able to access adult content, not only on Aylos platforms, but on any adult platforms,” he said. However, he said regulators have not been given the legislative tools they need to succeed.

“Even those regulators acting in good faith, like the UK, have no hope of achieving their and our stated goal of keeping children safe online.”

To be successful, technology giants like Microsoft, Apple and Google must either proactively provide device-based age verification or be forced to do so by lawmakers, Friedman said. WIRED reached out to the three companies but did not immediately receive a response.

In November, Aiello sent letters to Apple, Google and Microsoft, urging them to support device-based age verification across their operating systems, which means keeping personal data on a person’s phone or computer rather than providing it to a third-party site.

In his presentation on Tuesday, Friedman said the technology companies did not respond to the messages.

Microsoft previously pointed to WIRED a policy proposal stating that age verification should be implemented service-wide, while Apple sent WIRED its report on children’s online safety, noting that web content filters are turned on by default for every user under 18. Google spokesperson Carl Ryan previously told WIRED that adult entertainment apps are not available in its app store and that companies like Aylo “need to invest in specific tools to meet their legal and liability obligations.”

In the US, 25 states have also implemented age verification, and Pornhub has withdrawn from the majority of those states. Despite this, the US remains the site’s number one source of traffic, and age verification laws can be easily circumvented with a VPN that can block a person’s location.

State prosecutors also began taking action against xAI in response to the spread of non-consensual sexual images on X, via people using the chatbot Grok.

Google Images has “thumbnails of every pornographic image cached on the Internet,” Friedman said Tuesday. However, he added that current age verification laws do nothing to address explicit content on social media sites. He said the use of device-based age verification could be used to “filter out either explicit tweets or posts on X or explicit use of AI-powered chatbots or explicit posts and subreddits on Reddit.”