Looking under the bonnet of new pornography laws

We’re used to sifting through the spin and falsehoods when news stories break. Sometimes the issues are glaring. On other occasions it’s a feeling that things are more complicated than they seem. It sends you off to pick away the layers of a story with a bit of judicious research.

Take the quiet announcement of the government’s impending porn age restriction law. It sounds great right? Protect the kids. It’s been rolled out with that message despite routine admissions from the government itself that the age-verification system won’t actually be wide-reaching enough to stop kids from accessing porn literally everywhere else – namely social media.

Then there’s the issue of requesting that adults give up personal data in direct relation to whatever smut they’re trying to consume in the peace of their own homes, “because of the children”. As if Gen Z isn’t already aware of how to access their parents’ passport or drivers’ licence details to sidestep this needless and almost impossible-to-implement law.

The launch date has been changed not once but twice, likely because of the obvious difficulties putting it into place. Digital minister Margot James has said it may bring legal challenges costing the government up to £10m in the first year of rollout.

And, crucially, it will help give MindGeek (the organisation behind the internet’s biggest porn websites and production companies) an even larger monopoly. MindGeek’s AgeID, for example, one of the verification tools other websites may have to use, recommended pushing non-compliant websites (some of which may not wish to implement the rules for very good reasons) down in search engine rankings in response to a consultation over the law.

One porn website executive admitted that although they’d comply, they were concerned that “many of the systems being put forth as solutions … are profit-based”.

We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the risks this law poses for data breaches and scams. Nor have we properly understood how it might restrict independent producers of the kind of forward-thinking, transformative porn that might be an antidote to an industry full of forms of porn the government says it wants to withhold from young people. What that’ll do for children’s “safety”?

There’s always more going on under the bonnet. Even if the politicians hope you’ll just take in their assurances and move on (at least until the complications start to show themselves). Not every policy announcement is hiding a troubling reality, but enough are that it’s always worth interrogating even the most harmless-sounding headlines.

Yours,

Kuba Shand-Baptiste

Voices commissioning editor