Change of strategy in the porn portal dispute: xHamster wants to talk

In the dispute over age verification on porn portals, DNS blocks by the state media authorities against providers such as xhamster.com are practically the fruitless maximum penalty. They can easily be circumvented with simple measures such as changing the domain or DNS server and are only effective against technically inexperienced users. For reasons of youth protection, the state media authorities require porn providers to carry out effective age verification on their websites, which they do not want to introduce because they expect the number of users to decrease as a result.

DNS blocks at xHamster: Landesanstalt für Medien “forced to start from scratch”

Now, however, a change of strategy seems to be taking place and for the first time the lawyers from xhamster.com want to approach the media supervisors. After the company ignored all contact attempts by the media authorities for years, an amendment to the Youth Media State Treaty is now pending. The director of the State Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia, Tobias Schmid, sees the reason for the willingness to talk to the fact that “illegality […] no permanent solution [für ein Wirtschaftsunternehmen] is.” According to xHamster, they want to work with the authorities to find a uniform solution and are already examining various concepts themselves.

In the meantime, there also seems to be a first technical solution that could be acceptable to both sides. According to Mirko Vossen from the Commission for Youth Media Protection in Berlin, a biometric age verification by AI could be used to determine the real age of a person using various pointers without ID documents. This concept was received positively by the state media authorities and the porn industry would not have to fear such a sharp decline in the number of users.

Source: Southgerman newspaper