Age assurance debate simmers across EU with calls for stronger measures

Age checks remain in the headlines with new proposals from EU digital ministers to go further with legislation limiting social media access for youth. France is threatening to move ahead if member states can’t reach an agreement. And Germany has ordered an internet service provider to block access to porn sites, based on the Digital Services Act.

Ministers from Spain, Greece, France to present age assurance discussion paper

Age assurance legislation is heating up in the EU, where lawmakers in France, Spain and Greece are pushing for mandatory age restrictions for social media platforms. A report from Bloomberg says digital services ministers from the three countries have coordinated on a discussion paper ahead of a meeting with their EU counterparts on June 6.

Dimitris Papastergiou of Greece, Clara Chappaz of France and Óscar López Águeda of Spain want the EU to go further in implementing online protections for children.

Their proposed rules would make it mandatory for any device that can access the internet in the EU to include age assurance technology and parental control software, force online social networks to have built-in age verification mechanisms, and impose a “digital majority age” across the EU for accessing social media.

The ministers name no specific age under which youth would be prevented from using social media platforms. The GDPR says it can be set between 13 and 16. French president Emmanuel Macron has previously mentioned a possible age of 15.

There also remain questions about whether the ban would prohibit access for underage youth, or only the creation of social media accounts without parental consent.

Finally, the discussion paper asserts the need to mandate age-appropriate design that minimizes addictive and persuasive features.

France’s Chappaz, in particular, is not clowning around; she has said that in the absence of an EU-wide agreement, “France will have to take action” – potentially kickstarting a fragmentation of age assurance laws across the continent.

A report from Euro News quotes Chappaz calling out social media sites that say they can’t effectively keep kids off their platforms: “the platforms, which are among the most technologically advanced companies, know everything about our children: their tastes, their sleep patterns, the videos they watch when they’re not well. They are capable of pushing targeted content to an 11-year-old, but they wouldn’t know whether he was 13 or 15.”

Chappaz is on record saying she believes there should be “no social networking before the age of 15” and that “fast, reliable, anonymous technologies that do not store personal data for recognition already exist.”

Germany orders internet service provider to block Aylo porn sites

Age assurance is a topic of concern across the EU. An EU-wide interim age-verification app is currently under development. Besides France, Greece and Spain, EuroNews includes Ireland among those supporting stronger age assurance laws. Meanwhile, Germany has already imposed court-ordered blocks on Pornhub and YouPorn over missing age verification measures – according to MLex, “the first time an Internet access provider has been ordered to block a major international porn platform for non-compliance with age-verification rules.”

A release from the Berlin Administrative Court says that, since the imposition of a “coercive fine against the content provider” – in this case, Aylo – proved unsuccessful, “the state media authorities decided to take joint action against German-based companies that provide their customers with internet access (access providers). In April 2024, the Berlin-Brandenburg Media Authority ordered a Berlin-based access provider to block access to the relevant websites from Germany.”

Lawsuits and the urgent applications from Aylo were dismissed as inadmissible, on the grounds that they had already been told to comply, and failed. (The internet access provider did not challenge the orders.)

“The blocking order would not have been necessary if the content provider had acted in accordance with the law,” the court says. “Instead, it continued to distribute pornographic content without restriction and made it accessible to everyone, despite the immediately enforceable prohibition.”

“If the applicant now sought judicial protection against the blocking of its content, this would be an abuse of law.”

Digital Services Act typically used to block ‘serious threats’

The German case serves as a bit of a litmus test for the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which  restricts blocking orders to cases involving serious threats to life or safety, and has previously applied mostly to prosecute copyright infringement or extremist content.

The DSA requires Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) – defined as those with more than 45 million users in the EU –  to assess and mitigate systemic risks to kids and to comply with the DSA’s strictest rules on harmful content. Whether or not they qualify as serious threats to life or safety could be challenged.

Regardless, the European Commission’s newly published guidance on the DSA – which is open for public consultation – made it clear that online providers must implement age verification measures based on the level of risk their services pose to minors.

Aylo and its peers in the social media space continue to push for age assurance at the device level. But the porn giant has seemingly taken the hint from UK enforcement: it has notified its verified users that by June 30, it will remove any video that lacks proper documentation of performer ID and proof of consent.

Article Topics

age verification  |  Aylo  |  Digital Services Act  |  EU  |  Europe  |  France  |  Germany  |  regulation  |  social media