Pornhub has announced it will restrict access to its website in the UK from February.
Under the changes from 2 February, only people who have previously made a Pornhub account will be able to access its content.
It blames what it says is the “failure” of Online Safety Act (OSA) requirements for some sites to use age verification to stop children seeing pornography online.
In October, Pornhub’s parent company, Aylo, said the requirement had caused traffic to the website to fall by 77%.
The regulator Ofcom said at the time tougher age checks were fulfilling their purpose of stopping children stumbling across inappropriate material.
The has approached Ofcom for comment on Pornhub’s announcement.
Pornhub remains the UK’s largest porn platform, according to web tracker Similarweb.
But from 2 February, only those who have previously signed up for an account with the platform and gone through its age verification process will able to use it.
Alex Kekesi, head of community and brand at Pornhub’s parent company Aylo, said in a statement it was a “difficult decision”.
“Our sites, which host legal and regulated porn, will no longer be available in the UK to new users, but thousands of irresponsible porn sites will still be easy to access.”
She said the platform initially complied with OSA obligations “because we wanted to believe that a determined and prepared regulator in Ofcom could take poor legislation and manage to enforce compliance in a meaningful way”.
But six months after age check requirements were introduced as a way to stop children accessing adult content, Kekesi said the company’s experience “strongly suggests that the OSA has failed to achieve that objective”.
Those attempting to access Pornhub in the UK after 2 February will effectively be met with “a wall” instead of site content or its pop-up notice asking people to prove their age, she told reporters in a press conference on Tuesday.
Solomon Friedman of Ethical Capital Partners (ECP), which owns Aylo, said the company believed Ofcom was “working in good faith” to enforce age check requirements.
“The problem here, however, is not the regulator – it is the law,” he said.
“You have a dedicated regulator working in good faith, but unfortunately, the law they are operating under cannot possibly succeed,” Friedman added.
He said six months after the requirement for sites allowing sexually explicit content took effect in the UK, people were still able to easily access porn – such as by searching for it online.
The company reiterated its position that device manufacturers such as Apple, Google and Microsoft were best placed to have measures to stop children accessing porn sites.
“When access is controlled at the device level, it is efficient, it’s effective, it’s privacy-preserving,” he said.
