For the second time this year, the United Kingdom’s “porn block” law, which has been delayed repeatedly since it was passed in 2017, appears likely to be delayed yet again, this time with no date for the troubled “age verification” system to be put in place, according to a report by Britain’s Sky News on Wednesday.
The law has been scheduled to take effect on July 15, but has been attacked by critics as a “privacy time bomb,” as AVN.com reported, for its requirement that users upload sensitive personal documents to prove that they are over 18 years old and thus eligible to view online porn.
The law had previously been scheduled for implementation on April 1, but that date was scrapped with just three days to go. Before that, the U.K. government had pledged to put the country-wide porn block into effect by the end of 2018, but that obviously did not happen either.
According to Sky, “Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Secretary Jeremy Wright is expected to announce the climbdown in Parliament on Thursday,” and the British Board of Film Classification—the agency charged with overseeing the age-verification system—was informed on Wednesday that the July 15 implementation date had been scrapped."
The delay comes after the Digital Policy Alliance, a lobbying group representing online porn sites, send a memo to the BBFC calling for the law to be pushed back because of privacy concerns that had not been addressed, according to The Mirror newspaper. The DPA warned that in its current state the age verification system, which is left to individual porn sites to put in place themselves, would lead to "nefarious" operators online taking the “opportunity to harvest and manipulate user data.”
The DPA memo asked that the law be delayed until October 15, but according to the Sky report, the new delay will be “indefinite.”
Photo By Tim Reckmann / Wikimedia Commons
