Updated ,first published
The Canadian owner of the world’s largest pornography websites has begun blocking Australian users in protest at new age verification laws due to take effect on Monday.
Aylo, which operates adult sites Pornhub, RedTube, YouPorn and Tube8, restricted access to several of its platforms for many Australian visitors on Friday and said it was no longer accepting new account registrations.
Pornhub — ranked as the 15th most-visited website in Australia by analytics firm Similarweb — had not yet been blocked at the time of publication.
In a statement, an Aylo spokesman said that from March 9, Australian users will be “presented with a safe for work experience when they view our platforms.”
Australia was “following a similar approach to the UK, which all our evidence shows does not effectively protect minors, and instead creates harms relating to data privacy and exposure to illegal content on non-compliant platforms,” the spokesman said.
The spokesman said that requiring age checks at the operating system level by companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft would be more effective than site-by-site verification.
The company also cited a survey by the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a UK child abuse prevention charity, which found 45 per cent of British pornography users had visited sites not compliant with age verification since similar rules took effect there last July. Aylo has claimed Pornhub’s UK traffic dropped 77 per cent following that country’s crackdown.
Aylo has a troubled reputation: in 2023, the US Department of Justice found the company had profited from sex-trafficking proceeds, and last year the US Federal Trade Commission charged it with deceiving users about efforts to remove child sexual abuse material and non-consensual content from its platforms.
The company’s is a direct challenge to the eSafety Commissioner’s industry codes, which from March 9 require websites hosting pornography and other age-restricted material to implement age assurance measures including facial age estimation, digital wallets and photo ID. Non-compliance carries penalties of up to $49.5 million per breach.
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said she would “take enforcement action where there is systemic non-compliance”, and that the codes also cover AI chatbots, high-impact violence, self-harm and disordered eating content.
“These industry-developed codes shift that responsibility back where it belongs — onto the companies designing these digital platforms and profiting from their users,” Inman Grant said.
Communications Minister Anika Wells said at a press conference on Friday the industry codes were designed to “have big tech and the people who control these platforms do more to make sure that Australian kids are safer online”, with a particular focus on preventing children from accessing pornography.
UNICEF Australia backed the new codes, with head of digital policy John Livingstone saying children were encountering harmful material “at younger ages and more frequently than ever before, often by accident”.
“Just like we don’t let children go to cinemas and watch R-rated films, these changes mean they’ll now be less likely to access this type of content at home,” Livingstone said.
The new rules represent the second phase of Australia’s push to protect children online, following the under-16 social media ban that took effect in December.
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.
Emily Kowal is an education reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.
