German authorities are accusing Montreal-based Aylo, the owner of Pornhub, of reprogramming its site to knowingly circumvent a law that requires it to implement a state-approved age verification mechanism. The move by the porn multinational comes as several countries, including Canada, are considering similar bills.
“It’s unbelievable,” says Tobias Schmid, director of the North Rhine-Westphalia Media Authority, the western German state’s equivalent of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
“We are faced with a company active in Europe which, in a very explicit manner, rejects the decisions of a regulatory body and several courts of justice,” laments the regulator, who was in Ottawa last week for a meeting with his counterparts from the CRTC and Canadian Heritage.
“They are making money off the backs of children” by refusing to comply with these decisions, he thunders.
PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, THE PRESS
Tobias Schmid, Director of the North Rhine-Westphalia Media Authority
Since 2020, the German organization has been waging a high-profile battle against Aylo (formerly MindGeek), the Montreal company that operates Pornhub, the world’s most visited porn site. The company’s annual revenue, mainly from advertising and subscriptions to paid sites, was estimated at more than CAD$625 million in 2018, according to a report by the Canadian federal government.
The German regulator’s move, which also targets Ethical Capital Partners, Aylo’s Ottawa-based parent company, is aimed at ensuring that its sites comply with the requirements of a German law on the protection of minors that came into force in 2003.
Under the law, access to any pornographic content on the internet from Germany must be controlled by an age “verification key”, provided following an in-person check at German post offices, or by third-party companies that perform online age verification using artificial intelligence or a webcam session.
“Nobody goes to the post office with their passport and says they want to watch porn,” Schmid admits, but to date, about 100 age-checking mechanisms from third-party companies have been approved.
In 2023, a binding decision by a German administrative court confirmed that the mechanism is indeed legal and that the Media Authority has the competence to apply it, even if the sites’ servers are hosted abroad.
But after Aylo continued to refuse to comply, the German Media Authority ordered major German internet service providers to block access to Pornhub. A similar block was imposed on XHamster, a site based in Cyprus, as well as YouPorn and Mydirtyhabbit, two other Aylo subsidiaries.
Link to a mirror site
In response, Aylo then discreetly changed Pornhub’s URL to “circumvent the blocking order” so that German Internet users are, to this day, automatically redirected to a mirror site outside the scope of the order’s wording, say Mr. Schmid and Laura Braam, the legal officer of the North Rhine-Westphalia Media Authority.
Without denying having redirected its traffic in this way, Aylo indicates in an email to The Press have the “firm belief” that the blocking orders targeting its sites are illegal and “violate European Union laws” that take precedence over German laws.
The situation has forced German authorities to rewrite a new bill that will explicitly prohibit porn sites from using this mirror-site redirection strategy. “Its adoption is a formality,” Schmid assures. “It’s wasting our time, but in the end, we’re going to win.”
Miville-Dechêne “revolted”
“It completely revolts me!” says Canadian Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, who actively campaigns for the adoption of similar age control measures for porn sites in Canada. A bill to this effect (S-210), which she introduced in the Senate in 2021, will be at third reading in the House of Commons this fall.
At the same time, France, England and around fifteen American states are in the process of adopting similar laws imposing a form of age verification.
“This case shows that the big international porn platforms have no intention of complying with the laws. It is particularly disappointing coming from a Canadian company called Ethical Capital Partners, which one would expect, precisely, to demonstrate a certain level of ethics,” deplores Mme Miville-Dechêne.
Officially, Aylo says it supports control mechanisms to keep minors away from its platforms, but argues that the German method jeopardizes the privacy and security of Internet users.
For Mr. Schmid, himself a former media industry lobbyist, this position is nothing more than a “complexity trap.”
“They are trying to gain time by steering the discussion to make it seem like it is something complicated to regulate, but that is not the case at all. The protection of personal data is also part of the reality of the banking world and retail,” illustrates Mr. Schmid.
“It may cause problems for them and cause them to lose visitors, that’s true, but at the end of the day, it’s their problem, not ours,” he believes.
Learn more
-
- 57%
- Proportion of children aged 10 to 13 who have already viewed pornography in Germany; 53% of them were exposed to porn without having sought it out or asked for it and 33% consider it unrealistic.
Source: Survey conducted in 2023 on behalf of the North Rhine-Westphalia Media Authority among 3,068 minors