So the law was signed and age verification is coming to the UK. OFCOM has said they’ll start by blocking the biggest sites and then working their way down.

IMHO, this is just a huge fucking disaster all the way around. Apparently it will cost 2-8 GBP ($2.50 to $10+) to verify someone’s age. Years ago I remember figuring out that I made about 2 cents a visit. So there’s just no way to comply and make money. I can see paysites jumping through the hoops. They’ll have PG-13 tours and then raise the cost of membership by enough to validate the member. And trials for UK customers will be a thing of the past.

So the way I see this playing out is OFCOM blocks the top 20 sites and UK visitors will start trying out the smaller sites that aren’t blocked (yet). Then MindGeek might implement an AVS, but they’ll make people pay for it, though they’ll offer it free to their paysite customers, but it will work across all their sites so people will pay to get so many of the big tube sites back. Then the OFCOM block list gradually grows and smaller sites won’t have AVS because it costs too much. Or they’ll implement it but charge the surfers. Either way UK surfers start getting aggravated so they start using VPNs. At which point everything will sorta go back to normal, but there will always be a hit on traffic from the UK.

Personally the only system I see working is that all websites be required to label their content in a a factual manner with no culturally relative terms (e.g. nothing like “appropriate for ages 17+”), then let individuals, parents, and even governments filter as they see fit. But the filtering has to be on the device level so all browsers on a computer, phone or tablet have the same filtering. But that’s not at all what the UK is implementing. What the UK is doing will just be a miserable failure.