Pornography on the internet: Italy now also requires age verification

From November 12, internet offerings with pornographic content will also have to verify the age of users in Italy. This is reported by the news agency ANSA reported by the news agency ANSA, citing the responsible supervisory authority AGCOM, which is responsible for defining the technical and procedural modalities. According to this, after a six-month preparation period, providers must now ensure that visitors to their offerings are old enough and that they are indeed the people they claim to be. Among other things, an app can be used for this, which was specifically developed for age verification on behalf of the European Union and which is being tested in Italy, among other places.

Double anonymization

Italy is thus the latest country on an ever-growing list of states that want to ensure through technical measures that minors do not have access to pornographic content. Affected by this include Pornhub, YouPorn, XVideos, and numerous other internet offerings. Independent third-party providers are responsible for age verification, and it must be ensured that they cannot determine for which platform the verification is being carried out. At the same time, platforms should not receive any further information about the verified people who thus gain access to the content.

Following a similar measure in Great Britain, visits to pornography websites there have significantly decreased. Although the usage of VPN services to circumvent the national block initially skyrocketed, it has since noticeably decreased again. Nevertheless, the measure remains controversial, as it is easy to switch to services on the internet that do not perform age verification and sometimes even offer more extreme content. In France, major providers of pornographic content even withdrew after the introduction of mandatory age verification in the spring. VPN usage also increased massively there.

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(mho)