Close to three years after it was passed by the British parliament in 2017, the United Kingdom’s porn site “age verification” law appears no closer to taking effect. As AVN.com reported, implementation of the law—which requires porn site users to upload personal documents in order to prove that they are over 18—has been delayed repeatedly. Most recently, the law was supposedly to take effect on July 15, but that date, like several before it, fell by the wayside.
Despite the farcical results of the U.K. attempt to ban porn for teens and children, now Australia wants to copy the clearly flawed law, according to a report by the Guardian newspaper.
The Australian House of Representatives standing committee on social policy and legal affairs was tasked by the government this week with investigating how the U.K. age verification plan works—or doesn’t work—to determine if a similar system could be attempted Down Under. The committee is also investigating online gambling sites, which already use age verification systems, to see if those models would be appropriate for porn sites as well.
The committee has been assigned to learn "the potential benefits of further online age verification requirements, including to protect children from potential harm, and business and non-government organizations from reputation, operational and legal risks,” according to a report by ZDNet.
In what is perhaps a signal that the Australians have taken some lessons from the U.K.’s ongoing fiasco, the committee will also probe “risks and unintended consequences” of any proposed age verification law—risks such as privacy breaches, unwarranted restrictions on free expression, and whether putting an age verification system into place would simply push porn consumers into “unregulated/illegal environments or to other legal forms of these activities.”
But Australia is not the only country considering taking a cue from the United Kingdom. The country’s Oceana neighbor New Zealand may do the same thing, that country’s Children’s Minister Tracey Martin said last week, as AVN.com reported.
Photo By Owen65 / Wikimedia Commons
