LUXEMBOURG—Attorneys for the Montreal-headquartered Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub.com, urged a European Union (EU) court on Friday to annul its status as a so-called "very large online platform," or a VLOP, under the bloc's sweeping Digital Services Act (DSA).
AVN has reported extensively on the Digital Services Act and the European Commission's enforcement of the law on adult entertainment platforms and social networks. Under the act, a web platform classified as a VLOP is subject to higher standards of scrutiny about online safety from regulators in Brussels and by member states.
VLOPs are traditionally defined as web platforms with more than 45 million users across the 27 EU member states. Despite Pornhub arguing that it has fewer than 45 million users in the European Union, the enforcement arm of the commission classified the platform as a VLOP in 2023 alongside other sites like Stripchat.
Christopher Thomas, an attorney arguing Aylo's case, told the Luxembourg-based General Court, a lower court of the European Union's Court of Justice, that the VLOP classification was a bridge too far for the online safety regulators, according to legal news service MLex.com.
Thomas said, "If the commission rejects the providers' [Pornhub’s] methodology, on the basis that it is unreliable, then the commission must at the very least apply the same rigorous assessment to the methodology of any alternative estimate it intends to use."
Central to Thomas' case is that the VLOP status is flawed, and he questions why the commission would reject Aylo's data collection, as reported per DSA regulations.
At the time of this writing, Pornhub's DSA disclosures indicate 28.2 million average monthly users. Being that Aylo Freesites, the division of the parent company that operates Pornhub in much of Europe and the EU, has an operational base in Cyprus, a member of the bloc, it is subject to the strict enforcement of the DSA rules for VLOPs.
Paul-John Loewenthal, the attorney for the European Commission, told the court that Pornhub's classification was justified as a measure to protect minors online.
“Pornhub is listed among the 20 most visited websites in the world," Lowenthal explained, noting, “it came as a surprise in February 2023, when all providers of online platforms had to publish their user numbers, the applicant [Pornhub] published a number 10 million below the threshold."
A spokesperson for the European Commission told AVN in December 2023 that the Digital Services Act grants the executive branch of the bloc the power to justify VLOP classification through independent investigations and analysis.
"After careful analysis of the information received and discussion with the company, the Commission estimated that Pornhub reaches more than 45 million monthly average users in the European Union, therefore qualifying to be designated as VLOP," said the spokesperson in 2023.
During the hearing on Friday, Lowenthal pointed to numbers from Similarweb that reported about 75 million users from digital space covered by the union's DSA.
Lowenthal notes, “How many is irrelevant; all that matters is that it's above the 45 million user threshold.”
Stripchat also had a hearing in the General Court this past Thursday. Despite the commission lifting the VLOP classification for Stripchat in May 2025, attorneys for the parent company of the popular webcamming platform argued a similar line.
Technius, Stripchat's parent company with an operating base also in Cyprus, argued that the platform shouldn't have been regulated at the highest tier of scrutiny allowed by the Digital Services Act.
Tobias Bosch, counsel representing Stripchat, said that the platform "should at no time have been regulated as a VLOP by the commission,” and that the “factual situation has changed,” referring to new data on the number of users navigating to Stripchat from EU shared digital space, per additional MLex.com reporting.
Stripchat's parent company is looking for a court decision against the Commission, stating that its enforcement of the VLOP provisions in the DSA was broad and not applicable to the camming platform in the first place.
