German child protection regulators are on the verge of blocking one of the world’s largest pornographic websites. The officials are set to issue a blocking order to the country’s biggest internet service providers saying a pornographic website, believed to be xHamster, should be made inaccessible to Germany’s 83 million people.
The blocking order, which may be issued in the coming weeks by the Commission for the Protection of Minors in the Media ( Kommission für Jugendmedienschutz in German, or KJM), follows a failure by xHamster to introduce age verification checks to stop under 18s from accessing pornography. The order is the latest salvo in a two-year campaign by regulators to compel all pornographic websites accessible in Germany to implement age verification checks.
They already gave up on this, because they did not comply and Germany knows that they can’t really ban sites since such bans are easy to avoid. I can’t find any english source, so you will have to auto-translate this article:
They are now working on an Age-Verification-System that operates on the OS level. Every device will have a filter that blocks every site which does not have an Age-Verification-System that meets German regulations. It will not be limited to porn sites only, but every site that has adult content on it. That’s a lot. Germans will have a national intranet of sorts (similiar to China). Big tech companies already voiced their concerns in a letter they all signed. Germany is known to blatantly ignore expert opinions tho as this is not the first time they tried to push this filter. It is also not the first time they put in new regulations/laws that every expert was against. It will most likely fail tho, because it’s too ambitious and easy to circumvent (Linux, older Windows versions etc…)
I just heard it in the news today and they are actually going through with this LMAO.
It took multiple court hearings, but after years of back and forth they will now block three, yes THREE porn sites. This is awfully delusional.
PornHub said they label their site with a special marker that allows youth protection software to block access when its installed on the device, but the court said that “only 15% of parents” use that software, so they demanded PornHub to bend over and change their entire site for Germany. Hilarious.
Dinosaurs in politics. This entire anti-porn campaign “to protect kids” has been launched by a very christian politician who is part of the old gov. He is way too passionate with his censorship fetish and abuses his position.
I hope they replace him, now that the new gov will come into office next week. He has been suggesting the dumbest shit.
Seems like Germany is still a bit Nazi. Y’all did Nazi that coming, were ya?
In all seriousness. Germany is still kinda Nazi-ish with their censorship.
To be fair, after 16 years of CDU tyranny that saw “harder punishments” as the answer to any problem we now have a new government, which at least claims to be more liberal and wanting to reform the law and decriminalize many things.
On the other hand, they also announced that they want to continue with stricter action against CSA, so it could very well be that they are going to follow the course of introducing more and stricter punishments and questionable laws with no discernible benefits. I guess 2022 will show which way they go.