The United Kingdom in 2017 passed what would be the world’s first law blocking porn sites except for users who can prove their age by uploading personal documents. But two full years later, the law remains dormant after the government there delayed putting it in place for at least the third time, as AVN.com reported earlier this week.
Though the law has been repeatedly criticized as a potential disaster for the privacy of users, as well as for simply being ineffective with numerous, easily accessible methods for getting around the “age verification” system, the British government came up with a whole new excuse for delaying the law yet again, after a July 15 date for its implementation had seemingly been locked in.
The latest snafu led the U.K. edition of tech bible Wired Magazine to declare that the law has “turned into a farce.” But a farce that “exposes the complexity of regulating the internet.”
But Britain’s secretary for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Jeremy Wright, claimed that the latest delay was not due to flaws in the law and age-verification system themselves—but was in fact due to “an administrative error,” according to the U.K. Computing site.
Basically, Britain—which, as politicians there continue to wrangle over the U.K.’s “Brexit” pullout from the European Union, remains part of the EU—had simply failed to inform European regulators about the particulars of the law, to make sure that it meets EU legal standards.
“I recognize that people have campaigned passionately for a verification to come into force as soon as possible to ensure children are protected from pornographic material that they should not see,” Wright said in a statement. “I apologize to them all for the fact that a mistake has been made.”
Why the law, which has been around for two years, was never submitted to the EU went unexplained. But Wright said that completing the EU approval process could take another six months.
Photo By Alex E. Proimos / Wikimedia Commons
