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The Digital Economy Act 2017 threatened to introduce strict age verification for internet porn access coupled with ISP blocking for websites that don't comply.
However the legislation was fundamentally flawed by its voluntary approach to privacy and security. After a series of delays, the age verification section of the bill was put out of its misery in October 2019.
The censorship of internet porn returned
via the Online Safety Act which has wider ambitions on the censorship of the whole internet. The bill was discussed during 2020 and scrutinised by parliamentary committee in 2021 before being passed into law in 2023. Internet censor Ofcom is currently
implementing the censorship law with a major milestone of 25th July 2025 when rules about child protection and age verification for porn kick in.
In 2021 Ofcom considered and extended EU VoD censorship under an updated AVMS directive.
Ofcom is also consulting on similar EU inspired censorship ideas about shared user generated video on websites such as YouTube. Ofcom requires strict age verification for websites with porn videos but this will make little difference as these
rules only apply to British based companies and there simply aren't any of these left. VoD censorship will soon be superseded by the similar rules implemented under the Online Safety Act.
Meanwhile the Information Commissioner's Office has published
wide ranging age verification requirements for most websites in the name of data protection for children. These ICO rules came into force in September 2021.
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