PARIS — The Paris Judicial Tribunal held a hearing earlier this month with representatives of five of the most visited adult tube sites in France and set itself a July 7 deadline to decide whether to order internet service providers in the country to block access to them.
The four-hour hearing involved lawyers for Pornhub, Tukif, xHamster, XVideos and Xnxx, who presented their ongoing objections to the controversial 2020 law allowing France’s online content regulator ARCOM to seek a blocking order to target “websites that fail to prevent minors from accessing online pornography.”
The lawyers presented requests to nullify the proceedings and order a stay of the proposed block. The tribunal then gave itself until July 7 to make a decision.
France’s age verification mandate was surreptitiously added to a hastily approved domestic violence law during an atypical and sparsely attended COVID-era session of the French Parliament in July 2020.
Action Prompted by ‘Children Advocacy,’ Religious Groups
As XBIZ has been reporting, ARCOM was prompted to order a blockage of adult sites that do not implement the ill-defined 2020 age verification measures in response to a complaint by several associations claiming to represent “the children.”
This groups operate in tandem with anti-sex-work SWERF activists and politicians and extremist Catholic groups like Civitas, to specifically target those five tube sites.
Lawyers for the sites had contended that “the law was not in line with the constitution” but the court ruled in favor of ARCOM in January.
The 2020 law specifies that adult companies should be required to institute measures beyond simply asking an internet user whether they are of age. It also empowers a government official — the president of Arcom — to demand that the president of the judicial court order ISP providers to immediately block infringing sites in the entire country.
According to French tech journalist Marc Rees, who has been reporting on the developments for news site Next INpact, the tube sites’ basic constitutional challenge is based on the legislators’ vagueness in drafting the law, which violates the legal principle of “freedom of expression and communication.”
A Refusal to Issue Clear Guidelines
During the April 14 hearing, lawyers for the tube sites argued that compliance could not possibly be effected until ARCOM published clear guidelines, something the government has conspicuously avoided.
The tube sites also expressed their concern about not having been part of meaningful consultations about various experimental systems for age verification — like credit cards, government IDs or through a Louisiana-style third party contractor — that the Macron government has floated since September.
Moreover, the tube sites contend, ARCOM failed to correctly notify the relevant EU authorities of its intention to block access to them, as is required by the supranational union’s directives.
The patchwork of obscure organizations pursuing a self-appointed mission of “child protection” and sex work abolitionism has fought against issuing clear content guidelines as part of their campaign to prevent any open platforms — including Twitter and Reddit — to host whatever they may consider explicit material.
Among these groups are Parenthood and Digital Education Watch, founded by anti-porn activist and business school graduate Thomas Rohmer; noted anti-sex-work abolitionist lobby Fondation Scelles; ACPE; the National Union of Family Associations; a group calling itself Chameleon and another going by the name Respect Zone.
Rohmer spoke to Catholic news site Le Croix last week, urging ARCOM not to publish any clear content guidelines, which he called “a trap in which these sites want to snare us” and warned that his group will “fight so that it does not take place.”
Arcom’s lawyer Nicolas Jouanin told Le Croix that the regulator “is not here censoring pornography” but is trying to “put an end to a serious disturbance of public order”.