Blocking porn sites: the court will make its decision on July 7

Europe 1 with AFP 18:33 p.m., April 13, 2023

The representatives of five of the most consulted pornographic sites strongly opposed Thursday before the Paris judicial court the request for blocking initiated by Arcom, which tries to enforce the legal obligation to prevent access to their content by minors. At the end of a hearing of nearly 4 hours, during which the lawyers of the companies publishing the sites Pornhub, Tukif, XHamster, Xvideos and Xnxx presented applications for nullity of the procedure and a stay of proceedings, the court reserved its decision until July 7.

These companies - including MG Freesites, which publishes the Pornhub platform, domiciled in Cyprus and belonging to the world leader in porn Mindgeek, or Web Group Czech, which publishes Xvideos and Xnxx, founded by Frenchman Stéphane Pacaud - refuse to set up an age verification, because they consider the law insufficiently clear on the expected technical modalities. Despite the rejection of these reasons by the Court of Cassation in January, they still demand the publication by Arcom, the French audiovisual and digital policeman, of "guidelines" and regret not having been concerned by the experimentation of a mechanism recently announced by the government for implementation in September.

"A trap that the sites want to take us into"

Beyond that, they claim that Arcom did not properly notify its willingness to take blocking measures to the European authorities, as required by a Community directive. The publication of guidelines is "a trap that sites want to get us into. We are fighting so that it does not take place," Thomas Rohmer, founder of Open, one of the child protection associations that had seized the regulator at the end of 2021, told AFP.

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Access to pornographic content by minors can, in his view, be prevented by switching to a paid business model. For Arcom lawyer Nicolas Jouanin, these new requests from the sites are "obviously dilatory". "In this case, everything is done to complicate as much as possible an extremely simple legal problem," he pleaded. "The sites have taken this procedure hostage, it has been dragging on for months."

According to him, "Arcom is not here censoring pornography" but is trying to "put an end to a serious disturbance of public order". According to Médiamétrie's Global Internet Audience measure, in Q1 2022, all porn sites recorded a cumulative average monthly audience of 18.3 million unique visitors in France, 12% of whom were minors (more than 2.2 million).

A new round of formal notices

Three feminist associations (Osez le féminisme, Les Effronté·es and the Mouvement du Nid) also filed a complaint in November against the Pornhub platform for "dissemination of child pornography images and violent messages of a pornographic nature, accessible to minors". Present at the hearing, they withdrew their request to intervene so as not to slow down the proceedings.

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On Tuesday, Arcom announced a new round of formal notices targeting 3 pornographic sites and the launch of legal proceedings against 2 other platforms belonging to MG Freesites. The penal code prohibits exposing minors to pornographic photos and videos and the law on domestic violence of 30 July 2020 specifies that the companies concerned cannot absolve themselves of their responsibilities by simply asking an Internet user if he is of age.