Prepare your ID to watch porn: all about the government’s control system

The government has proposed protecting minors online. And among the goals of the proposal is to limit minors’ access to online porn. For this reason, the Executive Branch is examining the need for identification to access adult content on the Internet through a national identity document.

The proposal is still in its early stages, with no technical details of how the task would be accomplished. Many European countries tried this task without successlike the UK, which in 2017 became the first country to pass legislation requiring an online age verification system.

Their law required websites publishing pornography for commercial purposes to implement a “robust” age verification system to prevent minors from accessing their sites. Nevertheless, this plan was eventually abandoned in 2019. Its latest proposal, dated last December, aims to limit adult content by asking the user to provide a credit card, which is only available to people over 18 years of age. Today this is also not implemented.

There is nothing concrete in the European Union either. Major porn sites such as Pornhub or XVideos are required to prevent minors in Europe from accessing their content under the Digital Services Act (DSA), but There is no special identity verification system, especially through DNI.

Government’s idea to restrict porn involves electronic certificate and application

As we have already said, there is nothing concrete about how the Spanish government is going to implement this verification system for accessing porn sites, or if it will ever do so. He is currently considering several options.

One of them is develop an application which will function as a digital certificate issued by the National Money and Stamp Factory, which confirms that the user has reached the age of majority. Similar to the one used to make transactions online, but without as much personal data as it will have the peculiarity is that it will be anonymous especially for an adult site. In addition, the site can provide a QR code. the user must confirm that they are eligible to access the porn site, which will replace the phrase “I am currently of legal age” with a certificate verification.

The idea is to have everything ready by summer. The system will have more applications than just accessing adult sites. It can also be used to prevent a minor under 14 from registering on a social network.For example.

For now, we will have to wait to see whether this system will be finally implemented and, above all, to solve the technical problems that arise from it. And most importantly: in addition to the large providers of adult porn content, this also applies to smaller sites, which, as a rule, are outside the jurisdiction of the largest European countries. However, one thing is clear: the law is made, the trap is made. And the Government’s task in this regard will be titanic.