The EU Is Now Targeting Porn Sites

Back in April we noted that the EU had designated 17 sites as VLOPs" (Very Large Online Platforms), the ROUSs" (Rodents of Unusual Size) of the internet. Some of those sites are still contesting the designation, but in the meantime, the EU Commission has dug deep into its porn viewing habits and designated three more sites, all adult content focused, as VLOPs. Pornhub, Stripchat, and XVideos (not to be confused with ExTwitter's videos), are all designated as VLOPs, and needing to comply with the DSA's VLOP obligations by February 17th of 2024.

Pornhub, generally recognized as the largest adult content site around, has suggested that it disagrees with the designation, telling the media that it only has 33 million users in the EU, which is below the VLOP threshold. So, it would not be surprising to see one or all of these sites challenging the designation.

Given some of the controversies around adult content sites and how well they handle certain content, the much more stringent requirements on these sites may represent a pretty big challenge.

Most specifically, the DSA's requirements regarding strong protection of minors" may represent a challenge, not because the sites don't want to protect minors, but if you are required to protect minors, you first have to identify minors using your service, which means age verification. And most age verification tools actually put children at more risk, so if the only way to protect minors" is to put them at risk, it's a bit of a conundrum.

The adult content industry has been leading the pushback on age verification laws in the US, noting that they're not against making sure kids don't access their sites, but they want to make sure that it can be done in a way that isn't a privacy/speech nightmare, which they feel is using device based identification, rather than site-based (there are tradeoffs with this approach as well, but that's a separate issue).

Still, while the industry has used the 1st Amendment to fight these issues in the US, it obviously doesn't have that weapon to use in the EU. So, at least from what's been said so far, it sounds like they may just fight the designation based on thresholds first.