Underage fappers, rejoice. A British government scheme designed to stop underaged web users from viewing online pornography has again been delayed, the BBC reports.
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The changes, which would have required UK internet users to verify their age, were supposed to take effect on July 15, but because the UK ‘forgot’ to tell European regulators about the plan, they must wait to implement it. Completing the process of notifying the EU could take a staggering six months.
Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright told the House of Commons that the UK hadn’t informed Brussels about key aspects of the plan: an “important notification process was not undertaken for an element of this policy.”
Wright said it was still the government’s intention to activate the age-checking system…at some point.
For those who haven’t been following the story, the plans for compulsory age-checks for UK porn viewers, which the government has described as the first of its kind in the world, were designed to stop children from “stumbling across” inappropriate content. The plan will require pornographic sites to verify the age of UK visitors by law. If they fail to comply, they could face being blocked by Internet Service Providers.
It’s unclear how the rule will be enforced, but it’s suspected that sites might be required to ask users to upload photos of their ID.
Critics claim teens will find a way to circumvent the new rules. Astoundingly, the rules will exempt anyone using a VPN to make it look like they aren’t in the UK. Otherwise, they will just migrate to platforms not covered by the law: Twitter, Reddit and image-sharing community Imgur will not be required to administer the scheme because they fall under an exception. To qualify for policing under the rule, more than one-third of a site’s content must be pornographic.
Also, sites that host pornography but don’t do so “on a commercial basis” are exempt from the law.
The law’s proponents acknowledge that it is “not a silver bullet,” but instead a first step.