No Pornhub for France? Parent company Aylo withholds access over privacy dispute
The parent company of Pornhub, YouPorn and RedTube has decided to withdraw pornography access for users living in France from Wednesday onwards, it said in a statement on Tuesday.
Aylo Freesites' move was intended to push back against pressure from the French government to implement better measures for verifying if users were actually 18+.
The company told reporters that their websites would now display a message explaining that the takedown was related to Aylo's decision to uphold user privacy.
Due to a 2023 French government legislation (SREN) to better shield minors from inappropriate content, Aylo Freesites, as well as a slew of other porn platforms, had come under pressure to implement better age verification methods by June 7.
France-based users form Pornhub's second-largest audience in the world after those in the US, as per a 2024 statistics report from the pornography website.
"It's a matter of putting our values first, and that means communicating directly with the French people to tell them what their government is refusing to tell them," explained Solomon Friedman, a partner at Ethical Capital Partners (which owns Aylo) to reporters, justifying the company's strong commitment towards user privacy, and calling the French legislation "dangerous", "potentially privacy infringing" and "ineffective".
French Digital Minister Clara Chappaz accused Aylo of lying about the French government's measures, which she said were also privacy-preserving, in an X post, published on Tuesday.
"Lying when one does not want to comply with the law and holding others hostage is unacceptable. Adults are free to consume pornography, but not at the expense of protecting our children," she said. In a similar vein, the European Commission has also accused Aylo's platforms of breaching minor protection legislations that fall under the Digital Services Act.
Aylo has not yet specified how long the suspension would last, explaining that it hoped to find a solution to the issue so that its adult content could be unblocked again.
Society