The UK's ICO plans to ensure porn websites and adult-only services are verifying users' ages, expanding on its Age Appropriate Design Code and Children's Code
The UK's Information Commissioner's Office has pledged to crack down on porn sites and other adult-only services to ensure they are taking steps … Tweets: @oliviasolon , @oliviasolon , @livingstone_s , and @oliviasolon Tweets: Olivia Solon / @oliviasolon : This story triggered a long conversation internally about whether we could use “gangbang” in a story (from a quote). We could not. Olivia Solon / @oliviasolon : With the Online Safety Bill on hold, the UK's ICO is going to crack down on porn sites that fail to prevent children from accessing their services https://www.bloomberg.com/... Sonia Livingstone / @livingstone_s : “The UK's Information Commissioner's Office has pledged to crack down on porn sites and other adult-only services to ensure they are taking steps, such as verifying users' ages, to prevent children's access.” #ChildOnlineProtection #AADC #AboutTime https://www.bloomberg.com/... Olivia Solon / @oliviasolon : The new enforcement plans are a reversal for the ICO, which had previously maintained that services aimed at adults weren't subject to the Children's Code https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The UK has cycled through age-verification schemes before: a 2019 plan to outsource porn-site checks collapsed after criticism that it could hand MindGeek a monopoly on private data, and the Online Safety Bill's verification mandate is now on hold. With Parliament stalled, the Information Commissioner's Office is filling the gap by stretching its existing children's privacy regime — the Children's Code, enforceable with fines up to £17.5M or 4% of worldwide turnover — over adult-only services.
First-order effects
- Porn sites and other adult-only services must now treat age verification as an ICO-enforceable requirement rather than a pending legislative one, facing the Children's Code's fine ceiling if they fail.
- The ICO gains a compliance lever that doesn't depend on the stalled Online Safety Bill, letting it act against non-compliant adult platforms immediately.
Second-order effects
- Age-verification vendors and the private infrastructure around them — the sector the abandoned 2019 outsourcing plan was meant to create — get renewed demand as adult services scramble for compliant checks.
- Ofcom's later work on the file shows where this lands: its consultation on locking underage users out of porn sites weighs having banks or mobile networks confirm ages, pushing verification toward regulated identity holders.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, age checks stop being an adult-content rule and become general platform infrastructure — the same logic later drives the ICO and Ofcom to demand highly effective age checks from social media platforms barring under-13 accounts.
- A durable tension emerges between child-safety enforcement and data minimization, since every compliant check routes more identity data through whichever verifier wins — the exact concentration risk that sank the 2019 scheme.
The trend: UK regulators are assembling a de facto national age-verification layer across adult content and social platforms, with the ICO using children's-data enforcement to advance it while the Online Safety Bill waits.