The high-reach porn portal xHamster is threatened with a network block due to disregard of child and youth protection. “At xHamster we have a definitive decision against which no legal remedies are possible,” said Tobias Schmid, the director of the state media agency in North Rhine-Westphalia, of the German press agency. Other portal operators are currently still suing the notices affecting them before the Higher Administrative Court for North Rhine-Westphalia. The legal situation is “pretty clear” from the point of view of his authority: “It is pornography, there is no age verification and German law is applicable,” said Schmid.
Because xHamster has so far refused to communicate with the supervisory authority and has not implemented any of the measures to make its offer legal, the network operator has now been approached. These include Vodafone and Telekom: “We have informed you of the fact that there is illegal content in your networks that must be blocked and we are currently listening to it. Then we will make a decision.”
“We only implement access blocks technically if they are legally ordered,” said a Telekom spokesman on request. At Vodafone it was said: “We are currently working on the legal assessment.” In the answer to the State Media Authority, the decisions of the Düsseldorf Administrative Court of December 1 will be taken into account. The court had found the state institution to be right.
In response to a dpa request, xHamster announced that network blocks were “far from an optimal solution”. Through them, young people would only switch to smaller sites where they would be exposed to more extreme content. The company is ready to work with the German authorities. Currently, age checks are the only way to keep young people away from adult content. Such a technology can be used. But this must be done across the industry.