|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
UK Regulator Opens Investigation Into Pornhub Over Whether Its Apple-Based Age Checks Actually Work
Britain’s communications watchdog Ofcom announced Wednesday that it has launched a formal investigation into Pornhub, examining whether the platform has properly fulfilled its legal obligation to keep children from accessing pornographic content under the country’s Online Safety Act.
The probe centers specifically on a change Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo, announced back in May. Rather than building or relying on its own age-verification system, Aylo said Pornhub would instead lean on Apple’s device-level age-verification process to confirm that users accessing the site are actually over 18. Ofcom’s core concern, laid out plainly in its statement, is that Aylo may not have carried out adequate due diligence or thorough testing before rolling that new arrangement out. Aylo did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the investigation.
One detail Ofcom was careful to clarify is where exactly the scope of this investigation begins and ends. The regulator stated explicitly that its inquiry won’t produce any determination about how Apple itself runs its own age-verification technology. In other words, Ofcom isn’t investigating whether Apple’s system works in general, it’s investigating whether Aylo did its homework before deciding that outsourcing age checks to Apple’s system was a sufficient way to meet its own legal duties under UK law.
Those legal duties come from the Online Safety Act, legislation passed in 2023 that requires any site hosting pornographic material to use what the law calls highly effective age assurance, whether through verification, estimation, or some combination of both, specifically to stop under-18 users from readily encountering that content. Ofcom has the power to fine companies that fail to comply up to £18 million, or 10 percent of their global qualifying revenue, whichever is larger, and it can also block non-compliant sites from operating in the UK entirely.
Aylo’s relationship with UK regulators over this law has been unusually rocky compared to most other platforms operating under the same rules. The company initially rolled out age-verification methods that regulators recognized as compliant back in July 2025. But by early this year, Aylo had reversed course dramatically, announcing it would restrict access to Pornhub, along with sister sites YouPorn and Redtube, for all UK users starting February 2. In its public statement explaining the decision, Aylo argued the Online Safety Act had failed to achieve its stated goal of protecting minors, claiming enforcement had proven so inconsistent that users were simply migrating toward unregulated competitor sites offering none of the safeguards Aylo had put in place.
Aylo has continued pressing that argument in the months since. The company has said publicly that Pornhub’s UK traffic dropped 77 percent following the law’s implementation, and it reportedly wrote to the UK Parliament claiming that, as of this past June, non-compliant websites occupied seven out of the top ten search results for generic pornography searches, evidence Aylo has used to argue that strict enforcement against compliant platforms simply pushes traffic toward sites with weaker or nonexistent protections. Ofcom’s own data lends some support to part of that broader concern, showing that VPN usage across the UK has nearly doubled since the Online Safety Act’s age-check requirements took effect, a trend regulators acknowledge but argue doesn’t excuse individual platforms from meeting their own compliance obligations regardless of how users elsewhere behave.
Wednesday’s investigation adds Pornhub to a growing list of adult platforms Ofcom has scrutinized since the law’s enforcement began in earnest. The regulator has opened investigations into more than 80 pornography sites overall, issuing fines including £1.35 million against 8579 LLC, £1 million against AVS Group, and £800,000 against Kick Online Entertainment, among other enforcement actions targeting sites that failed to implement adequate age checks. Pornhub itself hasn’t previously faced a formal Ofcom fine, making Wednesday’s announcement a notable escalation given the platform’s prominence and its earlier voluntary decision to block UK access rather than continue operating under conditions it deemed unworkable.
The scrutiny isn’t confined to Britain either. Back in March, the European Commission opened its own formal investigation into Pornhub, along with three other major adult platforms, Stripchat, XNXX and XVideos, alleging breaches of the EU’s Digital Services Act over allowing children to access pornographic material. Companies found in violation there could face fines reaching as much as 6 percent of their global annual turnover, underscoring that Aylo’s compliance challenges extend well beyond a single national regulator.
The broader debate over the Online Safety Act itself remains politically contentious in Britain. The current Labour government has defended the law as an essential tool for protecting children online, while the populist Reform UK party, led by Nigel Farage, has called for its repeal, describing it as regulatory overreach that threatens free expression. That political disagreement has occasionally turned sharp, with UK Technology Secretary Peter Kyle previously drawing criticism himself for comparing opposition to the law’s child protection measures to siding with convicted predators, a comment that drew its own backlash regardless of where people stood on the underlying legislation.
For now, Wednesday’s announcement leaves Pornhub’s UK situation in a genuinely uncertain place. The platform remains blocked for most UK users following its own February decision to restrict access, and Ofcom’s new investigation into whether its Apple-based verification approach was properly vetted adds another layer of regulatory pressure to a relationship between Aylo and UK authorities that’s shown few signs of easing since the Online Safety Act’s requirements first took effect.
