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The company announced that new users in the UK will no longer be able to access Aylo’s porn sites, including Pornhub, YouPorn and RedTube, from Monday, citing changes to age verification requirements that it says have made the internet less secure.
In a statement announcing the move last week, Airo said people with existing accounts and age verification will continue to have access.
The UK introduced mandatory age verification on pornographic websites in July 2025 as part of the Online Safety Act, aimed at preventing children from encountering pornographic content online. In the six months since then, the Office of Communications (Ofcom) has announced that the top 10 most-visited porn platforms in the UK have come into compliance. According to Ofcom, Pornhub claims traffic to its site has fallen by 77%, and usage of virtual private networks (VPNs), which allow users to artificially check whether they are in a country without restrictions, initially spiked but then plateaued. Ofcom and online safety advocates see the legislation as an interim success.
But Aylo, Pornhub’s Canadian parent company, claims that based on its “data and experience,” age verification “makes the internet more dangerous for minors and adults, putting the privacy and personal data of British citizens at risk.”
This is because age verification frameworks “actually direct traffic to unregulated, dark corners of the internet, where non-compliant sites serve dangerous or illegal content to users,” the company said.
Experts are even more skeptical.
Ian Corby, from the Association of Age Verification Providers, told CNN it was too early to tell whether the law had changed children’s access to pornography because concrete data won’t be available until Ofcom releases its annual Children’s Media Usage and Attitudes Survey in the spring. But Corby pointed to an Internet Matters study published in December that showed children were using VPNs at the same rate as before the changes last summer as an early success story.
Ian Henderson, founder and chief executive of the Naked Truth Project, a British charity that fights porn addiction, said the decline in Pornhub’s traffic over the past six months suggests the law is working to prevent children from accidentally encountering pornographic content. A study published last year by the Children’s Commission found that 27% of those surveyed had viewed pornography online by the age of 11, and 59% had done so accidentally.
Mr Henderson said most of the people his charity helped first discovered pornography by chance.
While the UK’s age verification laws may be achieving their goal of preventing children from accidentally or easily viewing pornographic content, some research suggests the measures may be exposing adults to more harmful content.
An online poll by the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a British non-profit that runs a hotline for people concerned about porn use, found that 45% of those surveyed had visited sites that did not comply with age verification laws to avoid sharing personal information. On these non-compliant sites, 39% said they watched objectionable content.
A spokesperson for the Lucy Faithful Foundation told CNN that the foundation supports online safety laws, but wants people to be aware of the content they are consuming.
Mr Corby called on Ofcom to “ensure a level playing field requiring age verification for all pornographic websites accessed from the UK through a comprehensive, swift and large-scale crackdown”, pointing out that the wider use of age verification technology has made compliance for adult sites easier and cheaper than before.
Mr Corby said: “If a foreign carrier refuses to comply, Ofcom will need to use its business interruption powers to address where there are problems with its ability to profit from UK users.”
Claire McGlynn, a law professor at Durham University, said she was skeptical of Mr Ilo’s reasons for the decision given the profit-driven nature of the industry. She told CNN she believed the move was “part of a calculated public relations move to challenge current law” and aimed at “inspiring the public to reject restrictions on pornographic content and age verification.”
Mr Henderson also questioned Mr Ilo’s motives. “There’s a difference between compliance and care,” he says.
“They are a for-profit company,” Henderson continued. “On any platform, you would prefer registered users who have control over their data, rather than just anonymous users.”
A spokesperson for Ofcom told CNN that age verification has been widely implemented in the UK since the law was introduced. “We have taken strong and swift action against non-compliance, launching investigations into over 80 porn sites and fining porn providers £1 million, with further fines on the way.”
The spokesperson added that Ofcom “will continue to engage in dialogue with Aylo to understand this change in position”.
While Airo’s decision may reverse previous cooperation with UK regulators, experts say it remains consistent with Airo’s international actions. McGlynn noted that Airo also restricts access in many U.S. states with similar age verification laws. She said all of these moves were being made with “the same goal of provoking debate and reversing the legislative trend on age guarantees.”
And the trend of age verification is increasing. The European Commission has developed an age verification blueprint to enable online platforms in member states to introduce “user-friendly and privacy-protecting age verification methods.” Canada is again considering passing legislation to restrict young people’s online access to pornographic content after an initial attempt failed in 2023.
Stricter age checks for pornography will come into force in Australia from March 9, the second phase of efforts to protect young people online, which began with a social media ban for under-16s in December. A spokesperson for the country’s Electronic Safety Commission Secretariat told CNN that Airo “actively participated” in drafting the age verification law. “eSafety will closely monitor industry participants’ compliance once regulations begin and will investigate where necessary,” the spokesperson said.
“We will continue to work with the UK, the European Commission and other international partners to ensure that the lessons learned in the UK are reflected in future policy-making,” Airo said.
