The War on Porn Regular Updates about the Assault on The Adult Industry
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BERLIN — There’s something quietly fascinating about watching a digital giant inch toward compromise. After years of courtroom sparring and regulatory standoffs, Aylo — the parent company behind Pornhub — is preparing to take part in the European Commission’s pilot program for its new “white label” age-verification app, according to reports out of Germany.
An Aylo spokesperson confirmed the company is among the first group of participants testing the program, a notable shift for a business that has typically treated age-verification mandates with deep skepticism — and, often, outright resistance.
The European Commission rolled out the white-label AV app publicly in July, positioning it as a practical tool to help online platforms comply with child-safety guidelines mandated under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). During the pilot stage, the system is being tested across Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, and Spain — sort of a dress rehearsal for what could become a broader, standardized solution.
Italy has already moved to make the tool part of its compliance framework. As regulators have made clear, any age-verification system must accommodate the white-label app. Aylo’s sites — Pornhub, YouPorn, and Redtube — have been placed on a preliminary list of high-traffic platforms expected to comply under the country’s new rules. It’s the first tangible moment where “study phase” starts shading into real-world consequences.
Elsewhere in the EU, the pressure campaign hasn’t exactly been subtle. In France, after long legal back-and-forth, Aylo chose to block French users entirely instead of implementing the country’s age-verification mandates. Germany has delivered a partial reprieve: a court temporarily halted an order that would have required telecom providers to block access to Pornhub and YouPorn due to alleged AV noncompliance.
Much of Aylo’s cross-border legal wrangling boils down to a simple but thorny question: who actually has the authority to enforce these rules — individual EU nations or the bloc as a whole? In September, an advocate general at the European Union’s Court of Justice offered a nonbinding opinion advising that France does, in fact, have the power to require age verification from adult websites operating elsewhere in the EU but accessible to French residents. Final judgment remains pending, but the tea leaves have started to tilt toward national enforcement power. At the same time, the European Commission announced plans earlier this year to conduct a broad study evaluating how well Pornhub and other major adult platforms are complying with DSA requirements.
Whether this rising regulatory drumbeat pushed Aylo closer to cooperation — or whether the design of the EU tool itself made compromise palatable — remains an open question. The Commission’s guidelines emphasize “non-intrusiveness” as a central principle, a far cry from the heavy-handed verification models surfacing in much of the United States. That approach seems to resonate. When Aylo announced in June it would comply with the United Kingdom’s age-assurance rules under the Online Safety Act, the company praised Ofcom’s framework as “the most robust in terms of actual and meaningful protection we’ve seen to date.”
For now, there’s still a big unanswered question hanging in the air: timing. Aylo hasn’t said when — or exactly how — Pornhub users across the EU might encounter the new app. As the spokesperson declined to clarify a rollout date, a request for comment remains outstanding. Until then, the industry is left with that familiar, uneasy pause — waiting to see whether this step marks a real turning point or just another cautious toe dipped into regulatory waters.
