The War on Porn Regular Updates about the Assault on The Adult Industry
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When it comes to enforcing the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act, you can’t say that Ofcom, the organization charged with enforcing the OSA, is sitting back and doing nothing.
In recent months, Ofcom has opened an investigation into Pornhub’s reliance on Apple device-based age checks. They have fined the likes of XGroovy, FTVGirls and other site operators. They’ve also opened investigations into additional adult platforms.
What Ofcom hasn’t done, by its own admission, is make much of a dent in the problems the organization is purportedly trying to solve.
In the report linked above, Ofcom states that “most children in the UK say they have encountered at least one piece of harmful content online in a four-week period” and the evidence collected by the organization shows that “at a total level there was no significant change in the proportion of children encountering harmful content over the first nine months after the children’s safety duties came into force in July 2025.” Ofcom says that last finding is “concerning and shows that further progress is needed to protect children online.”
Of course, what Ofcom means by “further progress” is tighter restrictions on personal expression, more enforcement, more fines and more investigations. More of the same actions that have produced very little in terms of impact, thus far.
The gradual creep of laws like the OSA is on full display in the recent Ofcom statement, as well. As Ofcom noted, the UK Government “has announced its intention to introduce a social media ban for under 16s and additional protections for under 18s to create a safer online environment for children.” Ofcom says it will “shortly be publishing our rapid assessment of what highly effective age assurance could look like for determining whether someone is 16 or over and are working closely with the government on the implementation of the expected new restrictions” and “continue to drive compliance with the Online Safety Act for services that fall outside the social media ban and to improve the experience of 16–17-year-olds.”
I’m not sure what you were like when you were 16 or 17, but speaking strictly for myself, I was far from innocent – and I came of age well before the internet was a thing, let alone a thing filled to the brim with sexually explicit content.
I’d seen plenty of porn by the age of 16 too, most of it pilfered from a parental sock drawer or found laying about in the bedroom of some friend’s older sibling, who had turned 18 and was savoring the (more or less unfettered) right to view people without their clothes on that comes with reaching that apparently magical benchmark age.
By 16, I was sexually active, as well. Maybe not as sexually active as I wanted to be, but sexually active, nonetheless. Some folks might object to the fact that my girlfriend at the time had already turned 18, making our relationship technically illegal in our home state, which didn’t have a “Romeo and Juliet” clause in its age of consent laws at that time. But in our view (which I really think should count?) we were age peers and there was nothing at all unseemly about us dating. To be honest, the most concrete differences between the two of us were (a) she was much smarter than me and (b) she had a car of her own.
Looking back, do I feel like society failed to protect the teenage me? Not one bit. Do I have any regrets about hooking up with someone two years my senior when I was the apparently tender age of 16? Only that I didn’t get to do so many, many more times. Far from offering me traumatic memories, I look back on that time with a big, dopey smile on my face.
As fate would have it, I also didn’t turn out to be rapist, murderer, sociopath, or even a plain old mundane misogynist. And this has continued to be the case, even though I’ve now spent nearly 30 years toiling in the online adult entertainment space, which is the belly of the beast itself, to hear the likes of Ofcom tell it.
There’s no question the internet has a lot of content on it that isn’t made for children and shouldn’t be viewed by them. This content includes pornography, of course, but if I were making a list of the types of content I wouldn’t want kids to run across, porn would not be near the top of the list, let alone at its very summit. Not when there’s content from hate groups looking to recruit young people, videos of people doing unspeakably cruel things to animals (or to other people), political propaganda, recruitment materials from terrorist groups and literal bombmaking instruction manuals running around out there.
And here comes the really depressing part: Agencies like Ofcom likely won’t have much success reining in those other problematic content types, either, for all the same reasons they’re not having much impact on kids accessing online porn. They won’t fail for lack of trying, mind you; they’ll fail because the nature of the internet makes it a very, very difficult place to govern or tame.
So, what’s the answer? I know a lot of people probably don’t want to hear this, but the answer is parenting.
While it’s nice to think the government can serve as a big cyber nanny to your kids, the truth is the government simply isn’t up to the job. There are too many kids, too many websites and too many ways to circumvent even the most stringent of laws. It’s possible technological advances will come to the rescue in some meaningful way in the future, but for now, the best defense you have against the internet corrupting your kid is yourself.
Earlier I wrote about my lack of innocence at age 16. But what I did have at age 16 were parents that weren’t afraid to talk to me about things that might upset me. They were able to provide context, to explain the difference between sexual fantasies and sexual reality, to emphasize the importance of consent and above all else, to imbue in me a sense of personal responsibility and a need to view the world with both wonder and skepticism.
If the internet had existed when I was minor, would my parents have allowed me to surf it? Honestly, probably not. I wasn’t prohibited from watching TV, but I was limited to a one-hour daily allotment (with an exemption for news programs and televised sports) and encouraged to read, instead.
I’m sure it’s probably no easier for parents to keep their kids offline than it is for governments to keep those same kids off porn sites, but parents can – and should – be prepared to offer their kids guidance and context. If that, too, has become a government job, we’ve got much bigger problems than kids stumbling across online porn.
