PARIS — The Paris Judicial Tribunal on Friday decided to postpone its decision on whether to order internet service providers in the country to block access to five of the most visited adult tube sites in France.
As XBIZ reported, the tribunal held a hearing in April with representatives from Pornhub, Tukif, xHamster, XVideos and Xnxx, and set itself a July 7 deadline.
Today, the court “deferred its decision pending the examination, by the Council of State, of appeals against the implementing decree that specifies the means of action for ARCOM to sanction sites that fail to prevent minors from accessing pornographic content,” newspaper Le Monde reported.
The tribunal criticized the government “for not directly defining the technical measures to verify the age of internet users and for leaving this task to ARCOM.”
Xvideos and Xnxx attorney Kami Haeri told Le Monde that the postponement of the decision is “first of all a victory for the law.”
“For eighteen months, we have constantly stated that the government and ARCOM have failed in their most basic legal obligations, that the law was poorly made, imprecise and incomplete,” Haeri said.
A statement from MindGeek stressed that the company has long supported implementing mandatory age verification, but that to be effective, it “requires a comprehensive solution to avoid haphazard and selective implementation and to ensure the protection of children.”
Legal observers have pointed out that the failure to reach a decision could have been influenced by the tribunal judges’ reluctance to issue their opinion in the midst of the ongoing debate over the conservative Macron government’s controversial bill to “secure and regulate the digital space.”
The anti-porn provisions of that proposed bill stem from a September 2022 French Senate committee report recommending state regulation and censorship. The report’s title, “Porno, l’Enfer du Decor,” is a pun comparing the entire adult industry with the Christian notion of hell.