Faced with resistance from several online porn giants, the French digital watchdog initiated the first stage of an unprecedented standoff a few days ago. Since the beginning of June, access to the pornographic platforms Pornhub, YouPorn, and RedTube has been impossible from France. This sudden disappearance is not the result of a bug, but a strategic choice by the Aylo group, the owner of these sites, which preferred to withdraw from the French market rather than comply with the new age verification requirement imposed by the SREN law, which came into force in 2025. This legislation, supported by Arcom, now requires all adult sites to prevent access to minors through strict age control, under penalty of blocking or delisting.
Arcom isn't done
After Aylo's withdrawal, Arcom continues its hunt for recalcitrant platforms. Five major sites — XNXX, XVideos, XHamster, XHamsterLive, and Tnaflix — have just received a letter of observation, the first step in a procedure that could lead to their blocking or delisting in France. These platforms, hosted in Cyprus or the Czech Republic, have not implemented a compliant age verification system, often relying on a simple declaration button, which the regulator considers insufficient.
However, this warning is not insignificant: it is a formal warning, giving publishers one last chance to comply before Arcom contacts Internet service providers or search engines to cut off access to their content from France. An approach that could, in the long term, place the sites concerned in the same situation as Pornhub, RedTube, and Youporn.
X platforms cite privacy
To justify its withdrawal from the French market, Aylo puts forward a strong argument: the protection of its users' privacy. The group refuses to collect sensitive data, such as identity documents or selfies, believing that these procedures are too intrusive and expose them to the risk of data leaks. While the company has everything to gain by not lifting a finger, it also advocates for an age verification solution carried out upstream, by the operating system or a third-party application.
The French system nevertheless attempts to reconcile age control and privacy, by imposing the principle of “double anonymity”: the verification is carried out by an external service provider, which only attests to the user’s majority to the site, without transmitting personal information.
Europe accelerates on a common solution
The difficulty of imposing uniform regulation at the European Union level has pushed Brussels to accelerate the development of a cross-border age verification tool. The European Commission, supported by Arcom and other national regulators, thus wishes to harmonize practices and prevent platforms from being able to exploit regulatory differences between Member States. The upcoming guidelines should encourage, or even force, adult sites to adopt this new tool, even if European legislation does not allow, at this stage, to impose a single system.
Beyond the technical issue, the closure of the major free platforms reopens the debate on the sustainability of an economic model based on free access and the absence of control. Some observers see this as the beginning of an era where access to online pornography could become chargeable or conditional on more cumbersome procedures, disrupting the habits of the millions of French Internet users concerned.
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