Thwarted by Excessive Regulation, British Pornographers Call for… More Regulation!

If you would like an utterly depressing portrayal
of the pornography industry circa 2014, do check out
this account of the annual European adult industry trade
summit. As reported by The Guardian’s Amelia
Gentleman, the London-based expo was a veritable cornucopia of sad,
full of broke porn-site proprietors lamenting the myriad factors
killing their businesses—one big one being a U.K. law requiring a
porn site age-verification process. 

“The mood of the Xbiz EU 2014 conference is beleaguered, with
panellists conferring on how to respond to new regulations
requiring them to verify the age of anyone who tries to access
hardcore content” and “whether it makes sense to escape regulation
by moving their companies offshore,” writes Gentleman. The U.K.’s
new age-verification requirement—championed by TV-on-demand company
ATVOD—has caused “considerable bitterness” among U.K. porn
proprietors, she notes.

With good reason: The requirement will wind up costing
already-struggling websites around £1.50 per site visit, and that’s
not counting the cost in lost customers. Because porn-seekers can
easily access sites outside the U.K. that don’t require age
verification (and all the browser problems that the
apparently-buggy filtering technology brings with it), many will
simply navigate to another site.

You would think this might have British porn businesses trying
to fight the age-verification requirement, but those quoted in the
Guardian piece seem strangely on board with the
government’s assertion that this is necessary to protect the
children. “We have to demonstrate that we take child protection
seriously,” said one expo panelist. “I hate the idea of my
seven-year-old daughter seeing something that is not appropriate,”
said another. 

The problem, they insist, is simply that the rest of the
world’s Internet is less regulated, which creates an uneven
playing field, as does the U.K. government’s refusal to require
age-checks on other sites where porn shows up, such as
Twitter. 

“The biggest sites accessed by people in the UK are
international. Why doesn’t the government take those sites down? It
isn’t the UK industry that has provided the increased access to
internet porn. It is international,” Jamie, from Studio 66 TV,
says. 

Ban the whole Internet! Sigh… Like the taxi cabals who try to
quash Uber because its drivers don’t face the same strict
regulations they do, or the folks who want to forbid businesses
from moving headquarters overseas for less taxes and bureaucracy,
it seems porn site owners aren’t immune to the “Needs more
protectionism!” approach to government policy, either.