Wednesday, September 12, 2007

German Provider Bans Several Porn Sites

According to Spiegel.de, German internet provider Arcor has blocked porn sites Sex.com, YouPorn.com and another site for its 2.4 million users. A company called Video Buster/ Kirchberg Logistik, themselves an online porn provider at Sexyfilms.de, complained with the internet provider that YouPorn – a YouTube impostor, and already self-censored by Google Germany – and others were not implementing sufficient age verification for the site.

At this time, YouPorn already does ask users accessing the site from Germany to confirm they’re over 18 years old (this may or may not happen from the US or other places). However, Sexyfilms on their site are using a set of much more secure verification checks, e.g. one called “postident” in which a person is required to hand out their identity card witnessed by a post office employee in order to receive a ticket. Sex.com on the other hand shows a different result here when directly accessed versus what the Google cache shows; perhaps the site is using geolocation to change its appearance and content. The group behind Sexyfilms now claims that the easier age check allegedly employed by Sex.com and others is a competitive disadvantage.

Checking the top Google.com results for a search for porn, SafeSearch disabled, at this time returns Yobt.com, Keezmovies.com, Babesdosage.com and 7 others – none of which have any kind of age check prior to displaying the site’s contents*. With Arcor’s policy, all of these would need to be censored for their German users, adults and kids alike – but also any site which does use an age check consisting of e.g. just a single button click. In reply to the banning, an Arcor spokesperson states, “We got hold of preliminary injunctions against the makers of these websites to either stop distribution in this country, or meet the requirements of German youth protection laws.”

*Setting Google.com’s SafeSearch filter to its strictest mode returns 0 results for “porn”, displaying a SafeSearch notice instead. Using what Google calls the “moderate” filter, which is the default settings, returns aforementioned sites like Yobt.com and Keezmovies.com again.

German Provider Bans Seve ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (5)

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