Page 50 - AVN February 2018

FEATURE
FEATURE
INSIDE THE UK AGE VERIFICATION LAW
What the new regulations mean for your business By Stewart Tongue
What If I Ignore Age Verification Law Entirely?
Simply put, this law cannot be ignored by anyone in the UK because it calls for all adult content to be
blocked at the ISP level and only to be accessible to customers who opt-in to see it while verifying their age via
one of a handful of approved methods. So, failing to be an Age Verified compliant merchant means you’ll get
a total of zero legal sales in the entire UK. It is true that a small fraction of consumers might circumvent the
law with a VPN or take other measures but the vast majority will not and that’s a significant revenue stream to
consider.
Section 15(1) of the bill requires “pornographic material” not be published online with any “commercial
basis” unless precautions are in place to ensure it is “not normally accessible by those under 18.”
Furthermore, if your company operates in the UK you may be subject to fines that can be enforced
internationally. The law allows government enforcement officials to serve injunctions and force compliance.
Financial penalties are also legislated as up to 5 percent of all company annual revenue or £250,000
(roughly $329,000). These are serious penalties and the UK has expressed the intention of collecting fines
internationally while blocking all content from any merchant that fails to become fully compliant.
On the flip side, there is definitely a cost to becoming compliant. At least initially there will be additional
clicks and steps a potential customer must follow at the point of sale, potentially weakening conversion ratios.
Furthermore, depending which age verification system you choose, you are either facing an increase expense
consumers must pay to become verified as a barrier to entry, or you are accepting an additional expense the
merchant will pay as a cost of doing business.
One bright note to all this is that an age-verified customer who does jump through the hoops necessary to
access adult content will ONLY be able to do so from an age-verified merchant, so becoming compliant may
quickly allow you access to millions of consumers with far less competition as other vendors opt out and are
blocked out entirely.
However, the most important reason to become compliant is the simple fact that many in government have
already made it clear that this UK provision is seen as a test balloon, and if the system is effective, it will be
adopted in some form by many other countries rapidly.
“AS A GENERAL THEME IT SUGGESTS THAT IF IT’S
AGE-RESTRICTED OFFLINE, IT SHOULD BE AGE-
RESTRICTED ONLINE.”
—ALASTAIR GRAHAM, CEO, AGECHECKED
How Exactly Is Age Verification Supposed to Work?
First, it’s important to keep in mind that the legislation is not intended to prevent highly skilled techies
from circumventing it. They do understand that some people will find ways to skirt the requirements or share
a password and so on. The purpose of the law and the ancillary legislation is to prevent children or those who
find porn, gambling, vaporizers, alcohol and other adult activities abhorrent from stumbling across it over and
over by accident. So, questions of “couldn’t I sell access to my age-verified account to someone who isn’t age
verified” are misguided because those eventualities are accepted as a given, but are only applicable to a tiny
fraction of consumers in the UK market.
The law allows for different methods of age verification to be used to verify the age of a consumer, and the
ID may be verified in person by a store clerk or online with a simple document check at the point of sale. Once
a person is age verified they receive a unique ID number that they can use on all of their devices, and once a
device is verified it can access adult materials online without the need to “re-certify” it again.
That does create a major amount of friction at the point of sale for any first-time consumer, but once a
consumer and their device are verified the shopping experience online will work essentially the same way it did
before age verification became legally necessary.
Who Determines The Process Consumers Will Use To Become Verified?
Section 17 of the Digital Economy Bill outlines creation of “age-verification regulator” services. These are
certified third-party solutions must comply with a number of qualification requirements and will act much like
a bouncer outside a club checking IDs and turning away everyone who is underage or unable to prove they are
adults.
While the law itself provides only a basic framework for how verification is to be handled, the UK
government has yet to establish a regulatory body to enforce the bill’s provisions. The British Board of Film
Classification (BBFC) had been nominated as the regulator, but the BBFC will have a third-party manage
the actual mechanisms of the age verification process. So far it appears the certified age verification service
providers seeking to manage the day-to-day processing each have a somewhat different vision of how the
system should function. Presently there are three major competitors vying for dominance in this new field of
online consumer security. Below is a focused look at each service, their leadership and their vision for how the
process will be handled.
Business owners in the adult
industry are familiar with the long
history of regulatory entanglements
that government entities create in
the name of protecting certain
aspects of society. Now a new law
titled the Digital Economy Bill of
2017 is going into effect in the United Kingdom, aimed
at verifying the age of every adult browsing online, and
the ramifications are quite serious. Understanding the
way this law will be governed and the entities vying
to become the predominant verification solution is
essential to doing business in the UK now, and may
become crucial to your global success as these kinds of
policies are enacted and enforced by more nations in
the near future.
This new age verification law may sound similar to
past incarnations of governmental oversight like 2257
documentation to ensure performers are all over 18
years of age; Visa regulations that include eliminating
certain words like “forced” to avoid any perception
that consent was lacking in a porn scene; and so many
other examples dating back long before the Internet
even existed, when blue laws and obscenity standards
were often cited as ways to allegedly make society
more wholesome.
What makes this legislation very different is the
fact that while the Digital Economy Act is focused on
pornographic content, other legislation coupled with
this act make the framework much broader, covering
all aspects of adult online consumption, including
porn, gambling, alcohol and everything else reserved
from minors offline already. The law also has very
sharp teeth and adapting to it now is the best way to
protect your assets from significant harm.
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