Thwarted by Excessive Regulation, British Pornographers Call for… More Regulation!
If you would like an utterly depressing portrayal of the pornography industry circa 2014, do check out this account of the annual European adult industry trade summit. As reported by The Guardian's Amelia Gentleman, the London-based expo was a veritable cornucopia of sad, full of broke porn-site proprietors lamenting the myriad factors killing their businesses—one big one being a U.K. law requiring a porn site age-verification process.
"The mood of the Xbiz EU 2014 conference is beleaguered, with panellists conferring on how to respond to new regulations requiring them to verify the age of anyone who tries to access hardcore content" and "whether it makes sense to escape regulation by moving their companies offshore," writes Gentleman. The U.K.'s new age-verification requirement—championed by TV-on-demand company ATVOD—has caused "considerable bitterness" among U.K. porn proprietors, she notes.
With good reason: The requirement will wind up costing already-struggling websites around £1.50 per site visit, and that's not counting the cost in lost customers. Because porn-seekers can easily access sites outside the U.K. that don't require age verification (and all the browser problems that the apparently-buggy filtering technology brings with it), many will simply navigate to another site.
You would think this might have British porn businesses trying to fight the age-verification requirement, but those quoted in the Guardian piece seem strangely on board with the government's assertion that this is necessary to protect the children. "We have to demonstrate that we take child protection seriously," said one expo panelist. "I hate the idea of my seven-year-old daughter seeing something that is not appropriate," said another.
The problem, they insist, is simply that the rest of the world's Internet is less regulated, which creates an uneven playing field, as does the U.K. government's refusal to require age-checks on other sites where porn shows up, such as Twitter.
"The biggest sites accessed by people in the UK are international. Why doesn't the government take those sites down? It isn't the UK industry that has provided the increased access to internet porn. It is international," Jamie, from Studio 66 TV, says.
Ban the whole Internet! Sigh… Like the taxi cabals who try to quash Uber because its drivers don't face the same strict regulations they do, or the folks who want to forbid businesses from moving headquarters overseas for less taxes and bureaucracy, it seems porn site owners aren't immune to the "Needs more protectionism!" approach to government policy, either.