The Conservative government in the UK has promised to fight children"s access to pornography on the Internet, a fight it has been fighting for a long time, and has now published their consultations on how best to ensure only adults are viewing porn on the Internet.
Currently pornographic websites based in the UK require relatively strict age verification, requiring either a credit card or some other public service to properly capture age. The discussion at hand is how to ensure that sites based outside of the UK follow the same age verification process, as those sites are largely the most popular in the UK.
The methodology proposed in the document, called Child Safety Online: Age Verification for Pornography, is to follow the money. Simply put, payment processors will be restricted from forwarding payments from the UK to pornographic sites if they are found to be in breach of the age verification laws. Even though this will only directly affect the paid sites, the most popular ad-supported sites are generally owned by the paid sites and therefore will be required to implement the same age verification protocols or risk affecting the revenue of their parent companies.
As of now this is merely a public consultation and the UK government is requesting that interested parties submit their feedback here, either online, by email or post. The Conservative party"s quest against pornography has already drawn the ire of the rest of the EU, as well as having their porn filters opted out of by the majority of those affected. The consultation is open from now until April 12th, at 12:00pm GMT.
Source: UK Government | Image Internet porn via Shutterstock