On July 15th, the UK is gearing up to implement a ban on anyone under the age of 18 accessing porn. In order to enforce this, websites offering porn will have to verify the age of everyone accessing their site. It’s the first ban of its kind across the world and it has plenty of people concerned about how it will impact them.
If you’re concerned you won’t be able to access your favourite porn sites after July 15th, read on to discover how the ban could affect your and how you could potentially work around it.
The porn ban is an initiative devised by the Conservative government. It was first suggested back when David Cameron was Prime Minister. It’s part of the Digital Economy Act which was passed through government in 2017.
In the simplest terms, the porn ban is supposed to prevent those under the age of 18 from accessing pornographic content. The fear is that it is far too easy for young people to access porn. (All you need to do is head to Google and search porn and you’ll be spoilt for choice.) However, it could turn into a ban on anyone watching porn unless they go out of their way to prove they are over the age of 18.
If you’ve ever landed on a website promoting alcohol, you may be familiar with the age confirmation checks. However, the porn ban checks will require more than just checking a box to say you are of age or even submitting your birth date. The actual process for confirming your age hasn’t been announced yet, which has many people concerned about the nature of the ban.
If you regularly access porn, the ban is likely to impact you. However, sceptics maintain that the actual checks to confirm that websites are checking the age of their visitors are likely to be far weaker than the government promises.
Think about it. There are so many porn websites available, so the actual process of making every website conform to these checks is going to be quite an undertaking. It’s likely only the bigger websites that will be affected by the ban. The government has promised that any website flouting the new laws could lose access to payment services and could even be blocked in the UK entirely.
In reality, you’re not going to lose access to all porn websites on July 15th. This is simply the start of an implementation period that will allow websites to get up to speed. Some websites will have the checks ready to go but others may be a little slower in the adoption of the new rules.
Since we don’t know what the checks are yet, it’s difficult to say if it will be easy enough to get around them. For example, there has been talk of allowing people to use a phone that already has the adult filters turned off through the phone provider to access porn. This would mean that you would simply let your phone provider know that you don’t want adult filters and then confirm your age with your network provider.
If the process is more complicated, there could be ways to get around it. Since the ban is only in the UK, only IP addresses originating in the UK will have to go through the checks. Many people already use VPNs to access the internet, so you would be able to use this to get around the checks.
That said, the bigger porn websites are likely to be held accountable for people trying to get around the checks. This means that you might lose access to the biggest websites unless you confirm your age through a service like AgeID.
Absolutely! The ban does not affect sex toy websites, it only impacts websites offering porn. If you’re concerned how this porn ban will impact your sex life, we recommend stocking up on your favourite sex toys and digging into some classic erotica to get your fix. In this blog post, we share some of our top tips for the best erotic fiction beyond 50 Shades of Grey.
