Uk Age Check Law Seems To Be Hurting Sites That Comply, Helping Those That Don’t

In Brief

The United Kingdom precocious started enforcing nan Online Safety Act’s age-check rules, and The Washington Post reports that it’s already having a important effect connected web traffic.

U.K. rule now requires pornography websites to verify their users’ ages done intends specified arsenic look scans and driver’s licenses; it besides requires that online platforms forestall children from being exposed to big contented (which is why sites for illustration Bluesky and Reddit person begun checking immoderate users’ ages).

To study nan law’s effect, nan Post says it examined nan apical 90 porn sites based connected U.K. visitant information from Similarweb, uncovering 14 sites that still don’t execute an property check. All 14 of them look to person knowledgeable a melodramatic summation successful traffic, pinch 1 of them seeing postulation double year-over-year.

Meanwhile, galore websites ostensibly complied pinch nan rule while criticizing it, linking to a petition urging repeal, aliases moreover offered instructions for getting astir it.

John Scott-Railton, a interrogator astatine nan University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, told nan Post that this is “a textbook illustration of nan rule of unintended consequences,” adding that nan rule “suppresses postulation to compliant platforms while driving users to sites without property verification.”

Subscribe for nan industry’s biggest tech news