The United Kingdom‘s controversial — and unworkable — plans for mandatory age verification controls for adult websites have been scrapped, UK culture secretary Nicky Morgan announced Wednesday.
In a written statement concerning “Online Harms,” Morgan stated:
The government published the Online Harms White Paper in April this year. It proposed the establishment of a duty of care on companies to improve online safety . . . The government announced as part of the Queen’s Speech that we will publish draft legislation for pre-legislative scrutiny. It is important that our policy aims and our overall policy on protecting children from online harms are developed coherently in view of these developments with the aim of bringing forward the most comprehensive approach possible to protecting children.
The government has concluded that this objective of coherence will be best achieved through our wider online harms proposals and, as a consequence, will not be commencing Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017 concerning age verification for online pornography. The Digital Economy Act objectives will therefore be delivered through our proposed online harms regulatory regime. This course of action will give the regulator discretion on the most effective means for companies to meet their duty of care. As currently drafted, the Digital Economy Act does not cover social media platforms.
READ: The End of the UK ‘Porn Block’? Explaining the background to today’s government decision
This section of the Digital Economy Act required commercial providers of online pornography “to have robust age verification controls in place to prevent children and young people under 18 from accessing pornographic material.” The government had designated the British Board of Film Classification as the age verification regulator.
However, the mandatory age verification proposals had been beset by a series of delays after originally being due to come into force on July 15 of this year.
One month before that deadline, DCMS announced it had failed to notify the European Commission in time, undermining the legal basis of age verification resulting in a six-month delay.
Privacy groups had objected to the potential security risks of amassing a huge database of people’s personal details. The Open Rights Group noted guidance on security, encryption, pseudonymisation and data retention in the standard was “vague and imprecise”.
Culture secretary Morgan also stated “We will continue to engage with members of Parliament on the provisions of the online harms regime to ensure the most comprehensive online harms proposals which deliver on the objectives of the Digital Economy Act.”
The Register / Sex and Censorship
Papal penis joke by the inimitable Nick Tosches, our greatest living prose stylist.
