Porn portal xHamster threatens network blocking


The high-reach porn portal xHamster is threatened with a network block due to disregard of child and youth protection. “At xHamster we have a definitive decision against which no legal remedies are possible,” said Tobias Schmid, the director of the state media agency in North Rhine-Westphalia, of the German press agency (dpa).

Other portal operators are currently still suing the notices affecting them before the Higher Administrative Court for North Rhine-Westphalia. From the point of view of his authority, the legal situation is “fairly clear”: “It is pornography, there is no age verification and German law is applicable,” emphasized Schmid.

In 2020, Schmid had set himself the goal of enforcing the youth protection regulations applicable in Germany on porn portals with a large reach in Germany. In this country, content that is harmful to young people may only be made available to people whose age has been ensured using a certified procedure. However, these rules were rarely applied to online pornography, as the market is almost completely dominated by foreign providers.

Because xHamster has so far refused to communicate with the supervisory authority and has not implemented any of the measures to make its offer legal, the network operator has now been approached. These are, among others, Vodafone and Telekom: “We have informed them of the fact that there is illegal content in their networks that must be blocked and are currently listening to them. Then we will make a decision.”

No age verification: one click is enough and the entire xHamster range is open to you.

“We only implement access blocks technically if they are legally ordered,” said a Telekom spokesman on request. At Vodafone it was said: “We are currently working on the legal assessment.” In the answer to the State Media Authority, the decisions of the Düsseldorf Administrative Court of December 1 will be taken into account. The court had found the state institution right in full.

In response to a dpa request, xHamster announced that network blocks were “far from an optimal solution”. Through them, young people would only switch to smaller sites where they would be exposed to more extreme content. The company is ready to work with the German authorities. Currently, age checks are the only way to keep young people away from adult content. Such a technology can be used. But this must be done across the industry.

“I hardly know anyone to whom we have sent more letters and e-mails than xHamster, and we have received exactly zero responses,” said Schmid on the other hand. However, the portal is free at any time to comply with the law and thus to end the proceedings against itself. He was “somewhat astonished” that one of the network operators hired a law firm, asked for a generous extension of the deadline and “did not accept his socio-political responsibility any faster.” After all, it was about the endangerment of children and young people.


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