The War on Porn Regular Updates about the Assault on The Adult Industry
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Something strange is about to happen when a curious UK user types a familiar orange-and-black URL into their browser after Feb. 2. Instead of the usual scroll-and-click routine, the door quietly closes — unless they already built a verified account before the cutoff. Aylo, the parent company behind Pornhub and several other free platforms, says new UK visitors won’t be getting in.
Aylo explained in a statement, “New users in the UK will no longer be able to access Aylo’s content sharing platforms, including Pornhub, YouPorn, and Redtube. UK users who have verified their age will retain access through their existing accounts.”
During a press conference, Aylo VP of Brand and Community Alexzandra Kekesi clarified that anyone who already completed the age verification process — which requires creating an account — will still have access to Pornhub and Aylo’s other free sites. What won’t exist anymore is the on-ramp. No new accounts will be allowed after Feb. 2.
“You will have to use credentials to log in and access your account,” Kekesi said. “Anyone who has not gone through that process prior to February will be redirected elsewhere. Their journey on our platform will start and end there.”
Back in June 2025, Aylo had rolled out age assurance tools designed to meet government requirements under the UK’s Online Safety Act. At the time, Kekesi even praised Ofcom’s framework, calling it “the most robust in terms of actual and meaningful protection we’ve seen to date.” There was cautious optimism then — the kind you get when a system feels imperfect but workable.
That optimism has faded. At Tuesday’s press conference, Kekesi said Aylo now views the OSA as fundamentally broken. Sites remain “very accessible” to minors, she said, while traffic simply flows to noncompliant platforms that dodge enforcement altogether. Scale becomes a mirage. She also pointed out that most adult sites still don’t comply with the law, and warned that the system raises “considerable privacy issues” and exposes users to data breaches. It’s one of those uncomfortable moments where a rule meant to protect ends up creating new vulnerabilities.
“We can no longer participate in the flawed system that has been created in the UK as a result of the OSA,” Kekesi said.
Solomon Friedman, partner and VP for compliance at Ethical Capital Partners — the firm that acquired MindGeek in 2023 and rebranded it as Aylo — took a more hands-on approach during the briefing. From a UK IP address, he searched “free porn” to show how quickly unverified sites appear, even as Pornhub requires age verification. It was a simple demo, but the kind that lands like a thud.
“As new sites continue to pop up that are noncompliant, they simply repopulate and move higher in the Google ranking,” Friedman said.
He added that sites ignoring age assurance rules often ignore other safeguards as well — including measures meant to prevent CSAM and intimate image abuse. The problem doesn’t stay neatly contained in one policy lane.
“This law by its very nature is pushing adults and children alike to the cesspools of the internet,” Friedman warned.
In regions where Pornhub has already been forced to implement age verification, the platform has seen traffic drop by as much as 80%, as users chase free content elsewhere. Anyone who’s ever watched internet habits shift overnight knows how fast a crowd migrates when friction shows up.
Friedman stressed that Ofcom itself isn’t the villain in this story, saying the regulator has been acting in good faith, consulting with industry stakeholders and taking enforcement seriously.
“You have a dedicated regulator working in good faith,” he said. “But unfortunately, the law they are operating under cannot possibly succeed.”
He returned to a position Aylo has been repeating for some time: the only realistic way to keep minors away from adult content is device-level age assurance, not site-by-site gates.
“Microsoft, Apple and Google all have very robust built-in parental controls,” he pointed out. “Those are device-based controls that operate regardless of whether or not the site that is being accessed is compliant. The only thing needed is a mandate that these controls be activated by default.”
Right now, he noted, those protections are still “opt-in, not opt-out.” In other words, they exist — but only if someone actively turns them on. Human nature being what it is, that’s a fragile bet.
Friedman demonstrated how device-level tools like Google’s SafeSearch can block access to adult content even when a VPN is in use, and urged major tech companies to “do the right thing proactively” or risk being “forced to do the right thing by government.”
When asked whether shifting responsibility to big tech simply pushes the problem onto someone else, Friedman framed it as a question of what actually works in the real world.
“This is not a matter of shifting responsibility to anyone,” Friedman said. “When access is controlled at the device level, it’s efficient, it’s effective, it’s privacy-preserving, it gets the job done. It just works.
“Human behavior is why these laws are failing,” Friedman added. “Legislate not contrary to human behavior, but consistent with human behavior online — and that is at the device level.”
A company representative also confirmed that outside the UK, Aylo still plans to participate in the European Commission’s pilot program for its “white label” age verification app — a reminder that this debate isn’t settling anytime soon. If anything, it’s just changing shape, like water finding the next crack in the pavement.
