VPN usage increases after porn providers withdraw from France
Porn providers have withdrawn from France due to mandatory age verification. VPN usage is now rising sharply.
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France has adopted stricter rules for verifying the age of pornography consumers, which came into force in March. As a result, a major provider ceased operations in France on Wednesday. Shortly afterwards, VPN providers recorded a sharp increase in user numbers.
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The Canadian media and IT company Aylo, which owns porn portals such as Pornhub, YouPorn and RedTube, ceased operations in France at 5:00Â a.m. on Wednesday morning. At around 5:30Â a.m., Proton noticed a sharp increase in the number of users of its VPN service ProtonVPN.
Access to pornography, “not our intention”
When asked by heise online whether the figures were real, Proton replied: “We developed Proton VPN to help people in authoritarian countries deal with online censorship – a gateway to pornography was obviously not our intention. But a VPN can be used in this way, and registrations from France have temporarily increased tenfold.”
The provider goes on to explain: “We believe that age verification is not the best way to prevent children from accessing adult content. There is no age verification exclusively for children – it always affects everyone. If foreign porn sites or other third-party providers collect ID documents from adults, this creates new risks, for example as potential blackmail material. A technically more sensible approach would be content controls that are implemented directly on the devices that parents make available to their children.”
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Other VPN providers are also seeing similar effects. Malwarebytes also offers VPN software and now writes that “wherever people normally want to watch porn, the use of VPNs has increased”. This has also been observed in the USA. Pornhub blocked access to its services in Florida for similar reasons, whereupon VPN demand increased by 1150 percent. In Texas, the increase in VPN usage following the introduction of similar laws amounted to around 235 percent.
The company Aylo announced this move on Tuesday of this week. The French government reacted with a demonstrative shrug of the shoulders. If Aylo prefers to leave France instead of applying the law, the company is free to do so, said Clara Chappaz, the French Secretary of State for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Digital Technologies. The Minister for Gender Equality, Aurore Bergé, also reiterated her government's commitment to protecting minors – child protection is the goal of the more robust age verification.
(dmk)
