A potentially explosive deadline that would have affected millions across the country has come and gone.
And now it looks like it is set to be delayed for at least six months.
No, it’s not Brexit, but rather a controversial ruling on access to online pornography – dubbed the ‘Porn Block’.
Age verification was due to come into force on July 15, meaning X-rated websites will ask would-be viewers to prove their age in a bid to prevent under-18s accessing unsuitable material.
Professor of Sexual Cultures at the University of Sunderland, Clarissa Smith dismissed the plans an “easy point-scoring political exercise” whose intended outcomes are not deliverable and instead likely to have other consequences, particularly for data privacy, which “should worry all of us”.
Professor Smith said: “Verification of adult content has not been well thought out, objections to the proposals were ignored even when they pointed out the difficulties of creating a workable system and, consequently, it has now been delayed. While most people agree that under-18s accessing pornography is not good, controls of this kind were unlikely to prevent inquisitive teens accessing content.”
The Culture Secretary confirmed the postponement saying the government had failed to tell European regulators about the plan.
The world-first initiative proposed to prevent young people “stumbling across” porn online by checking the age of every online porn viewer in the UK.
So, what is the UK ‘Porn Block’ and what are the problems with it?
The idea was that all pornographic websites would be required to have verification of a user’s age before they can permit them to view the website.
Enforcement would have been the responsibility of the British Board of Film Classification – the body responsible for setting age restrictions on films – with the power to require internet service providers (ISPs) or mobile network operators to block sites that don’t comply.
Professor Smith said: “Over the last two decades government has rolled out a series of laws aimed at curbing pornography online, the legislation has not been based on good evidence and in fact, this decision to create the block appears to have triggered by some very poor research which asked young people a series of very broad questions and then interpreted the results in such a way as to suggest that the majority of young people risked becoming ‘addicted’ to porn.
“That kind of scaremongering is never a good basis for legislation but the reality is, regulating porn is an easy way to score points. In a political sense, you can be seen to be doing something and few people are going to stand up and tell you that you’re wrong.
“Yet, if we really are worried about young people ‘becoming addicted’, simply saying ‘you can’t look at this material’ is hardly a solution to that. Sexually explicit imagery is available on all types of platforms across the internet; introducing age verification will not stop young people seeing it or seeking it out.”
How would the ‘Porn Block’ have worked for those wanting to access the sites?
The type of age-verification depended on which sites you visit.
One option would redirect viewers to a non-pornographic page where data such as email addresses and card details can be entered.
Professor Smith added: “If you’re not happy giving over these details, and a lot of people won’t be, it was expected that some shops across the UK would offer special ID cards so people can verify their identity. The cards will reportedly give a verification code that lasts for 24 hours to prove your age.
“As we saw with the Ashley Madison hack, we can’t just hand over our privacy and our private details to tech companies and hope for the best. With this legislation would have come the creation of the largest database of British porn habits and no one was taking adequate responsibility for what could have happened to that data.”.
Professor Smith said: “As we have seen online in the past, preventing people from accessing certain material simply leads them to find other ways and other platforms to seek out what they want.
“So we may have been be pushing young people (who are much more tech savvy than many adults) towards even more problematic areas of the web simply because they are curious about an entirely normal aspect of human life,
“We have to be careful that in trying to solve a problem we don’t fully understand, we actually end up make things much worse.”