UK's Ofcom imposes robust age checks on porn sites, which could include photo ID matching, facial age estimation technology, and credit card checks
Ofcom sets out new rules that could include photo ID matching and credit card verification — The UK media regulator will make it harder …
Financial TimesDaniel Thomas
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the operational turn in a long-running UK age-gating effort: earlier plans contemplated credit-card checks and potential ISP blocking, while Ofcom later consulted on ways sites could obtain age confirmation from banks or mobile networks. The new rules narrow the gap between a policy objective and the verification methods operators must deploy.
Pornography-site operators serving UK users must implement age-assurance processes robust enough to satisfy Ofcom, shifting access from self-declared age toward identity, payment, or biometric-age checks.
UK users seeking access face additional verification steps and may have to choose among methods with different privacy and accessibility trade-offs.
Second-order effects
Age-verification and identity-assurance providers gain a clearer compliance market, while operators must weigh verification accuracy, data handling, user drop-off, and implementation cost.
The rules give Ofcom a concrete basis for oversight; later probes of operators' age checks show how technical standards can turn into enforcement scrutiny.
Third-order effects
If this model proves durable, age assurance is likely to become a reusable access-control layer across categories of regulated online content, rather than a porn-site-only requirement.
The lasting policy tension will be whether regulators can demand highly effective exclusion of minors without making identity collection or biometric assessment a routine condition of lawful adult access.
The trend: The UK is moving from voluntary or declarative age gates toward enforceable, technology-mediated access control for online content.
This includes social media sites so by July, Bluesky has to implement this for me and other UK Users or be fined up to 10% their turnover, or be blocked by ISPs/Mobile providers. — All porn sites must ‘robustly’ verify UK user ages by July www.bbc.com/news/article...
think what you want about porn, but the UK is a nation of horny motherfuckers. — this will not stand here, this will get laughed or stormed out before it even gets to the floor. [embedded post]
Not that anyone asked for a large experiment on the presumably-mollifying effects of porn on violence by teenagers, but looks like we're about to get it. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/u...
Justice Kagan gets into the other laws in other states. A third of the country now has some sort of age verification law on the books. Kagan asks: will some of these pass through the eye of the needle and satisfy strict scrutiny? www.chron.com/culture/arti...
There are compelling arguments that age gating is effective and constitutional. But the Texas law is a badly written, overly broad law. For one, it classifies pornographic websites as any sites where “one third” of its content is “harmful to minors” — bsky.app/profile/davi...…
Alito gets into a question of whether or not the ID verification at stake in Ginsberg - showing ids to buy porn at a store - burdens youngish looking adults who are of age but get carded because of how they look.
After a discussion of what percentage of material can be considered material “obscene to children”, which FSC says is around 70% on websites FSC represents, Kagan asks to get back to the questions of scrutiny.
Gorsuch says he's worried about creating a “constitutional regime that prefers technology” when discussing the differences between brick and mortar stores and online porn
People dunking on Alito for this are being idiots. The lawyers for porn sites are trying to make the claim they are protecting important speech, Alito is forcing them to admit it's just about selling porn.