Ofcom Watch

Ofcom has investigations into two pornographic services - Itai Tech Ltd and Score Internet Group LLC - under our age assurance enforcement programme.

Under the Online Safety Act, online services must ensure children cannot access pornographic content on their sites. In January, we wrote to online services that display or publish their own pornographic content to explain that the requirements for them to have highly effective age checks in place to protect children had come into force. We requested details of services' plans for complying, along with an implementation timeline and a named point of contact.

Encouragingly, many services confirmed that they are implementing, or have plans to implement, age assurance on around 1,300 sites. A small number of services chose to block UK users from accessing their sites, rather than putting age checks in place.

Certain services failed to respond to our request and have not taken any steps to implement highly effective age assurance to protect children from pornography.

We are today opening investigations into Itai Tech Ltd - a service which runs the nudification site Undress.cc - and Score Internet Group LLC, which runs the site Scoreland.com. Both sites appear to have no highly effective age assurance in place and are potentially in breach of the Online Safety Act and their duties to protect children from pornography. Next steps

We will provide an update on both investigations on our website in due course, along with details of any further investigations launched under this enforcement programme

The US right leaning forum website GAB has blocked internet users located in Britain. UK users can now only see a landing page explaining that UK internet censorship laws are unacceptable to the free speech loving forum. The website explains its actions as follows:

ATTENTION: UK Visitor Detected

The following notice applies specifically to users accessing from the United Kingdom.

Access Restricted by Provider

After receiving yet another demand from the UK's speech police, Ofcom, Gab has made the decision to block the entire United Kingdom from accessing our website.

This latest email from Ofcom ordered us to disclose information about our users and operations. We know where this leads: compelled censorship and British citizens thrown in jail for hate speech. We refuse to comply with this tyranny.

Gab is an American company with zero presence in the UK. Ofcom's demands have no legal force here. To enforce anything in the United States, they'd need to go through a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty request or letters rogatory. No U.S. court is going to enforce a foreign censorship regime. The First Amendment forbids it.

Ofcom will likely try to make an example of us anyway. That's because the UK's Online Safety Act isn't about protecting children. It's about suppressing dissent.

They're welcome to try. The idea that a British regulator can pressure a U.S. company that's IP-blocking the entire UK is as farcical as it is futile. If anything, it proves our point: censorship doesn't work. It only reveals the truth about the censors.

We proudly join platforms like Bitchute in boycotting the United Kingdom. American companies should follow suit. The power of the UK's parliament ends where the First Amendment begins.

The only way to vote against the tyranny of the UK's present regime is to walk away from it, refuse to comply, and take refuge under the impervious shelter of the First Amendment.

The UK's rulers want their people kept in the dark. Let them see how long the public tolerates it as their Internet vanishes, one website at a time.

 

Update: Ofcom responds

23rd April 2025. See article from ofcom.org.uk

The Online Safety Act introduces new rules for providers of online user-to-user, search and pornography services, to help keep people in the UK safe from content which is illegal in the UK, and to protect children from the most harmful content such as pornography, suicide and self-harm material.

Wherever in the world a service is based, if it has links to the UK, it now has duties to protect UK users. This includes having a significant number of UK users, or that the UK is a target market. These rules will also apply to services that are capable of being used by individuals in the UK and which pose a material risk of significant harm to them.

The Act only requires that services take action to protect users based in the UK -- it does not require them to take action in relation to users based anywhere else in the world.

Ofcom believes its flexible approach to risk assessment and mitigation allows all services to take appropriate and proportionate steps to protect UK users from illegal content. Some services might seek to prevent users in the UK from accessing their sites or parts of their sites, instead of complying with the Act's requirements to protect UK users. That is their choice.

If a service restricts UK users' access, that action would need to be effective in order for the service to fall out of scope of the Act. The key test remains whether the service has links to the UK. This will depend on the specific circumstances (including whether it is still targeting UK users, for example, by promoting ways of evading access restrictions). Ofcom would assess whether a service is in scope on a case-by-case basis and, where the Act applies, would consider the service's compliance with the law and, where necessary, use our investigation and enforcement powers.

We recognise the breadth and complexity of the online safety rules and that there is a diverse range of services in scope.

New regulation can create uncertainty and navigating the requirements can be challenging. Ofcom is committed to working with providers to help them comply with the Online Safety Act and protect their users. We have therefore developed a range of tools and resources to make it easier for them to understand -- and comply with -- their obligations. We also recently published a guide to help small services navigate the Online Safety Act.

US state department officials have challenged Britain's internet censor over the impact on freedom of expression created by new online censorship laws, the Guardian understands.

A group of officials from the state department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) recently met Ofcom in London. It is understood that they raised the issue of the new online safety act and how it risked infringing free speech.

The state department body later said the meeting was part of its initiative to affirm the US commitment to defending freedom of expression, both in Europe and around the world. During the meeting, Ofcom officials claimed the new rules were only in place to deal with explicitly illegal content and material that could be harmful to children.

A state department spokesperson said: As Vice-President Vance has said, we are concerned about freedom of expression in the United Kingdom. It is important that the UK respect and protect freedom of expression.

Details of the meeting emerged after Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, denied that concerns over free speech had featured in tariff negotiations with the US.

In February, the US vice-president, JD Vance, complained of infringements on free speech in the UK. Elon Musk, one of Trump's closest allies, repeatedly claimed that some prison sentences handed down to people who incited the riots on X were a breach of free speech.

Free speech advocates say that the UK censorship law is going to bring about a culture of 'if in doubt, cut it out' as platforms seek to avoid being subject to Ofcom's enforcement powers.

Children will be prevented from encountering online pornography and protected from other types of harmful content under Ofcom's new industry guidance which sets out how we expect sites and apps to introduce highly effective age assurance.

Today's decisions are the next step in Ofcom implementing the Online Safety Act and creating a safer life online for people in the UK, particularly children. It follows tough industry standards, announced last month, to tackle illegal content online, and comes ahead of broader protection of children measures which will launch in the Spring.

Robust age checks are a cornerstone of the Online Safety Act. It requires services which allow pornography or certain other types of harmful content to introduce 'age assurance' to ensure that children are not normally able to encounter it.[1] Age assurance methods -- which include age verification, age estimation or a combination of both -- must be 'highly effective' at correctly determining whether a particular user is a child.

We have today published industry guidance on how we expect age assurance to be implemented in practice for it to be considered highly effective. Our approach is designed to be flexible, tech-neutral and future-proof. It also allows space for innovation in age assurance, which represents an important part of a wider safety tech sector where the UK is a global leader[2]. We expect the approach to be applied consistently across all parts of the online safety regime over time.

While providing strong protections to children, our approach also takes care to ensure that privacy rights are protected and that adults can still access legal pornography. As platforms take action to introduce age assurance over the next six months, adults will start to notice changes in how they access certain online services. Our evidence suggests that the vast majority of adults (80%) are broadly supportive of age assurance measures to prevent children from encountering online pornography.[3]

What are online services required to do, and by when?

The Online Safety Act divides online services into different categories with distinct routes to implement age checks. However, the action we expect all of them to take starts from today:

• Requirement to carry out a children's access assessment. All user-to-user and search services -- defined as 'Part 3' services[4] -- in scope of the Act, must carry out a children's access assessment to establish if their service -- or part of their service - is likely to be accessed by children. From today , these services have three months to complete their children's access assessments, in line with our guidance, with a final deadline of 16 April . Unless they are already using highly effective age assurance and can evidence this, we anticipate that most of these services will need to conclude that they are likely to be accessed by children within the meaning of the Act. Services that fall into this category must comply with the children's risk assessment duties and the children's safety duties.[5]
• Measures to protect children on social media and other user-to-user services. We will publish our Protection of Children Codes and children's risk assessment guidance in April 2025. This means that services that are likely to be accessed by children will need to conduct a children's risk assessment by July 2025 -- that is, within three months. Following this, they will need to implement measures to protect children on their services, in line with our Protection of Children Codes to address the risks of harm identified. These measures may include introducing age checks to determine which of their users are under-18 and protect them from harmful content.
• Services that allow pornography must introduce processes to check the age of users: all services which allow pornography must have highly effective age assurance processes in place by July 2025 at the latest to protect children from encountering it. The Act imposes different deadlines on different types of providers. Services that publish their own pornographic content (defined as 'Part 5 Services[6]) including certain Generative AI tools, must begin taking steps immediately to introduce robust age checks, in line with our published guidance. Services that allow user-generated pornographic content -- which fall under 'Part 3' services -- must have fully implemented age checks by July.

What does highly effective age assurance mean?

Our approach to highly effective age assurance and how we expect it to be implemented in practice applies consistently across three pieces of industry guidance, published today[5]. Our final position, in summary:

• confirms that any age-checking methods deployed by services must be technically accurate, robust, reliable and fair in order to be considered highly effective;
• sets out a non-exhaustive list of methods that we consider are capable of being highly effective. They include: open banking, photo ID matching, facial age estimation, mobile network operator age checks, credit card checks, digital identity services and email-based age estimation;
• confirms that methods including self-declaration of age and online payments which don't require a person to be 18 are not highly effective;
• stipulates that pornographic content must not be visible to users before, or during, the process of completing an age check. Nor should services host or permit content that directs or encourages users to attempt to circumvent an age assurance process; and
• sets expectations that sites and apps consider the interests of all users when implementing age assurance -- affording strong protection to children, while taking care that privacy rights are respected and adults can still access legal pornography.

We consider this approach will secure the best outcomes for the protection of children online in the early years of the Act being in force. While we have decided not to introduce numerical thresholds for highly effective age assurance at this stage (e.g. 99% accuracy), we acknowledge that numerical thresholds may complement our four criteria in the future, pending further developments in testing methodologies, industry standards, and independent research.

Opening a new enforcement programme

We expect all services to take a proactive approach to compliance and meet their respective implementation deadlines. Today Ofcom is opening an age assurance enforcement programme , focusing our attention first on Part 5 services that display or publish their own pornographic content.

We will contact a range of adult services -- large and small -- to advise them of their new obligations. We will not hesitate to take action and launch investigations against services that do not engage or ultimately comply.

For too long, many online services which allow porn and other harmful material have ignored the fact that children are accessing their services. Either they don't ask or, when they do, the checks are minimal and easy to avoid. That means companies have effectively been treating all users as if they're adults, leaving children potentially exposed to porn and other types of harmful content. Today, this starts to change.

As age checks start to roll out in the coming months, adults will start to notice a difference in how they access certain online services. Services which host their own pornography must start to introduce age checks immediately, while other user-to-user services -- including social media - which allow pornography and certain other types of content harmful to children will have to follow suit by July at the latest.

We'll be monitoring the response from industry closely. Those companies that fail to meet these new requirements can expect to face enforcement action from Ofcom.

Notes

• Research shows that children are being exposed to online pornography from an early age. Of those who have seen online pornography, the average age they first encounter it is 13 -- although more than a quarter come across it by age 11 (27%), and one in ten as young as 9 (10%). Source: 'A lot of it is actually just abuse'- Young people and pornography Children's Commissioner for England
• Research from the UK Government indicates that UK firms account for an estimated one-in-four (23%) of the global safety tech workforce. 28% of safety tech companies are based in the UK according to recent research by Paladin Capital and PUBLIC .
• Source: Yonder Consulting - Adult Users' Attitudes to Age Verification on Adult Sites
• 'Part 3' services include those that host user-generated content, such as social media, tube sites, cam sites, and fan platforms.
• Services that conclude they are not likely to be accessed by children -- including where this is because they are using highly effective age assurance -- must record the outcome of their assessment and must repeat the children's access assessment at least annually.
• 'Part 5' services are those that publish their own pornographic content, such as studios or pay sites, where operators control the material available.