Another one bites the dust…
On March 9th, 2026, Pornhub will go dark for Australian users. Yep… another country. Another set of age verification laws. Another market where the world’s most recognisable adult brand has decided that the withdrawal method is the safest protection.
If you’ve been following this saga – and at AdultVisor, we’ve been tracking it for years – the playbook is familiar by now. Government passes age verification law. Pornhub’s parent company Aylo objects on privacy grounds. Aylo restricts or blocks access entirely. Users scramble for VPNs. Politicians claim victory. Kids find porn elsewhere anyway…
Rinse and repeat.
It’s a shitty situation for any publisher in the adult industry. And I say that with experience, having gone through and censored about 600 images from the AdultVisor vault (to remove our “adult” content).
PHub’s Australian exit is just the latest chapter in a global battle that’s now spanning over 20 US states, the UK, France, Germany, and counting. So let’s take stock of where things stand… because the map of places where you can’t freely access Pornhub is starting to look rather crowded.
Australia: The Newest Casualty of Age Verification
Australia’s Designated Internet Services Code kicks in on March 9th.
The rules, finalised by the country’s eSafety regulator, require any site whose “sole or predominant purpose” is serving adult content to implement age-assurance measures before letting users through the door. Non-compliance can lead to civil penalties of up to AU$49.5 million – roughly $35 million USD – per breach.
That’s some serious coin.
Makes sense why Aylo, one of the world’s largest porn companies, is not going to FAFO…
Aylo’s response, so far, is basically the same one they’ve deployed everywhere else. Australian users will be met with a “safe for work” experience when they visit the platform – which is a polite way of saying Move On Boys, the Wankfest is Over.
From a PR perspective, they are not exactly mincing their words:
Australia is “following a similar approach to the UK, which all our evidence shows does not effectively protect minors, and instead creates harms relating to data privacy and exposure to illegal content on noncompliant platforms.”
Poking around, I can already see that Aylo sites like Redtube, YouPorn, and Tube8 have begun blocking new Australian account registrations before the deadline has even arrived.
The platforms are “not currently accepting new account registrations” in the region.
Don’t hold your breath for that to change.
The UK: Where It All Went Wrong (Again)
If we look elsewhere, the most recent country to dabble with age verification laws is, of course, the UK.
Being based in the UK, I can tell you that it’s gone down (mostly) like a sack of shit.
Just this week, I was in the pub discussing with friends how you can’t even mention “VPN” without getting dodgy stares now. The term invites this instant smirk of “I know what you’re up to…”
And yet, collectively around the table, if you were to examine our local connections, anybody would think the United Nations were convening. With nobody from the UK…
Yes, the UK has been trying to introduce some form of age verification for porn sites since approximately forever.
The original attempt, under Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017, was meant to launch in 2019. It was delayed. Then delayed again. Then quietly abandoned in 2019, in what was one of the more embarrassing U-turns in British internet policy – which is saying something lol.
But Westminster doesn’t give up easily. The Online Safety Act, which received Royal Assent in 2023, took a second run at it. From July 25, 2025, all UK porn websites were required to implement robust age verification checks. And this time, Ofcom was the regulator with the teeth…
Initially, Aylo complied. They put age checks on Pornhub. Traffic hit the skids, promptly dropping by 77% among UK users.
Staggering numbers really. More than three quarters of UK Pornhub users either couldn’t be bothered to verify, didn’t want to hand over ID, or simply went elsewhere.
(Or… more likely… they accessed via a cheap VPN, from Buttfuck Nowhere.)
Whatever, but for Aylo, the “elsewhere” is the crux of their argument. A survey by the Lucy Faithfull Foundation – a child abuse prevention charity, no less – found that 45% of UK porn users had visited sites that weren’t compliant with the age verification rules. Of those, 39% said they’d watched content that made them uncomfortable.
The implication is clear: push people away from regulated platforms, and they end up in even seedier corners of the Internet.
By February 2nd, 2026, Aylo was so royally fucked off that it decided to throw in the towel. They pulled the plug for new UK users entirely. No more account registrations. No more age verification process.
Existing account holders who’d already verified could still log in – but for everyone else, Pornhub in the UK was effectively twatted.
Ofcom’s response was deliciously dry: porn services “have a choice between using age checks to protect users as required under the Act, or to block access to their sites in the UK.”
Hilariously, though, Aylo has since worked out a way to monetise UK eyeballs within the existing rules.
UK users can now enter their site, by confirming that you are 18 (a simple button press)… only to be greeted by a wall of SFW adverts for Jerkmate, right where the videos used to be:
Say it after me now…
“Are YOU tired of jerking off alone?!” 🤦♂️
France: Liberté, Égalité, No More Pornhub
It’s not just the UK that is square-as-a-nun in Europe.
France, Pornhub’s second-biggest market globally, got the same treatment in the summer of 2025.
The SREN law, passed in 2024, gave French regulator Arcom the power to impose legal sanctions and block non-compliant adult sites. The requirements included a “double anonymity” verification system, with ARCOM’s technical framework setting minimum standards for how age checks should work.
Another real PITA.
Aylo said they’d spent years trying to work with Paris to find a privacy-preserving solution. They couldn’t. So they suspended access for all French IP addresses across Pornhub, YouPorn, and RedTube.
The French got treated to a characteristically cheeky blocking page featuring Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.
I suppose if you’re going to block an entire nation’s access to free porn, you might as well do it with a sense of theatre; the French way.
Arcom, for its part, accused Aylo of choosing to “shirk the requirement of protecting minors.”
They also pointed out that numerous technical solutions existed on the market that could verify age whilst protecting personal data.
Well… yes.
But none of them are particularly attractive.
That argument hasn’t exactly swayed Aylo anywhere else, either.
Interestingly, Pornhub had already gone dark in France once before – then briefly restored access – before blocking it again when legal challenges were resolved in the regulator’s favour. It’s been an on-again, off-again situation… now in forever-off territory.
Germany: The Longest-Running Legal Drama
The Germans love a bit of “procedure”, and fuck me, they’ve been squabbling over this for over half a decade.
In fact, Germany’s age verification battle has been a slow-burn procedural drama stretching back to 2020.
That’s when the Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia first asked Aylo – then still operating as MindGeek – to add some effective age verification on Pornhub, YouPorn, and MyDirtyHobby. Aylo… ignored them. The regulator wasn’t too happy, and things escalated with the courts getting involved.
Multiple rulings confirmed that Pornhub’s pop-up “Are you 18? Click yes” system was, unsurprisingly, not what anyone would call a robust verification mechanism.
Shock, horror!
Anyway, by April 2025, the Berlin Administrative Court upheld various blocking orders against Pornhub and YouPorn after years of fannying/non-compliance.
German ISPs were then ordered to DNS-block the sites.
But here’s where it gets properly messy.
In January 2026, a different German court – the Neustadt Administrative Court – overturned blocking orders from a different regional media authority, ruling that the EU’s Digital Services Act had effectively superseded Germany’s national youth protection laws.
The court argued that under the “country of origin” principle, Aylo’s Cyprus-based platforms were subject to Cypriot law, not German law.
So you’ve got two German courts reaching opposite conclusions at roughly the same time. The situation remains a legal tangle, with appeals likely heading further up the chain.
German efficiency at its finest.
The United States: Don’t Even Get Us Started…
If the international picture is complicated, the American landscape is an absolute circus…
What’s new these days?
Not all of this can be laid at the Orange Man’s door though…
It started with Louisiana in 2022 – the first US state to pass an age verification law for adult sites. Pornhub initially complied, and traffic from the state dropped by 80%. That was apparently all the evidence Aylo needed that compliance was a losing game.
Since then, the dominoes have fallen at staggering speed.
As of early 2026, Pornhub has restricted or blocked access in 23 US states. That’s more than a third of the American population living in states where they can’t freely access the world’s most popular porn site.
The list reads like a roll call of the Bible Belt and beyond: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia – and growing.
Each state’s law is slightly different, naturally, because American federalism loves nothing more than a regulatory patchwork.
Some define the threshold as sites with one-third adult content. Kansas set theirs at 25%. Wyoming’s law applies to any site hosting adult content… no matter how little.
And in a truly special touch, Alabama’s law requires porn sites to display a health warning telling users that pornography is “proven to harm human brain development” – in effect, treating Pornhub like a pack of cigarettes.
Kansas, meanwhile, managed to include “homosexuality” in its legal definition of pornography. In 2024.
The Supreme Court Changed Everything
The biggest development in the US fight came on June 27, 2025, when the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton that Texas’s age verification law was constitutional.
This… was the case the industry had been dreading.
I spoke to several US-based industry figures at the time and the overwhelming reaction was: “FFS, what now?“.
The adult entertainment trade group had argued that age verification laws violated the First Amendment by burdening adults’ access to protected speech.
The lower courts had bounced back and forth on which legal standard to apply. Ultimately, as is always the case in the US, the Supreme Court settled it: intermediate scrutiny – not strict scrutiny – was the appropriate test.
And, apparently, Texas’s law passed that test comfortably.
Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, compared age verification for porn sites to existing age restrictions on buying alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. The three liberal justices dissented, arguing that strict scrutiny should have applied.
The ruling didn’t just uphold Texas’s law.
It effectively greenlit every similar law across the country. And with the KIDS Act – a federal age verification bill — clearing the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the very same day Aylo announced its Australian exit, the writing on the wall is getting increasingly difficult to ignore.
The Aylo Argument Is Creaking
You can say whatever you want about Aylo, but their messaging has been consistent.
Across every jurisdiction, Aylo’s position has been remarkably uniform.
They’ve publicly supported age verification for years.
What they object to is the method.
Their preferred solution has always been device-based verification, and it’s easy to see why.
Rather than requiring hundreds of thousands of individual websites to collect sensitive personal data – government IDs, credit card numbers, biometric scans – Aylo wants Apple, Google, and Microsoft to build age verification into their operating systems.
Every phone, tablet, and computer would start as a kid-safe device by default. Adults would verify once, at the OS level, and that verification would carry across the internet.
This seems like common sense to us.
Apple has already begun implementing age verification requirements for 18+ app downloads. Aylo’s suggestion is just to expand that system to the browser.
The counterargument – made by regulators in the UK, France, Australia, and the US – is that this amounts to passing the buck. Ofcom has made clear that porn sites themselves have a legal obligation to prevent minors accessing their content, and pointing at Apple doesn’t discharge that obligation.
And so the standoff continues.
VPNs are Laughing Their Way To The Bank
By now, we’re all familiar with the pattern…
Every time Pornhub blocks a new country or state: VPN searches spike through the roof.
When Florida’s law took effect on January 1st, 2025, VPN demand surged by a reported 1,150% within hours. Texas saw a 234% jump.
In the UK, Arkansas, Utah, North Carolina, and Virginia, VPN searches hit five-year highs around their respective roll-out dates.
The data tells a pretty blunt story.
A significant chunk of adults simply don’t want to hand over personal identification to watch porn – and a cheap VPN subscription is a far easier alternative than scanning your passport.
All of this raises the uncomfortable question that nobody in government seems keen to answer: if the primary effect of these laws is to teach millions of adults how to use VPNs, whilst simultaneously driving traffic to unregulated sites that don’t bother with age checks… who exactly is being protected?
What Comes Next?
The age verification trend/headache is only accelerating, and it shows no sign of relenting anytime soon.
If the free tube sites keep disappearing behind verification walls, paid porn sites might end up being the path of least resistance.
After all, everywhere you look, the freemium giants face a potential shit sandwich…
The EU is developing an Age Verification Blueprint for member states. Italy has just passed its own sweeping laws. Spain and Greece are pushing for mandatory device-level age assurance across the entire EU.
In South America, Brazil’s new digital child protection law takes effect on March 17th, 2026.
And in the US, the KIDS Act could yet leads to federal age verification requirements, which would make the current state-by-state approach look…rather quaint… by comparison.
Aylo, which must be absolutely sick of this pattern, continues to withdraw from market after market – a strategy that is either principled or self-interested, depending on your perspective.
They’re betting that governments will eventually come around to device-level solutions when the current approach demonstrably fails to keep kids off porn.
Whether they’re right remains to be seen.
Personally, I wouldn’t rely on nimble policy adjustments from the famously lumbering state.
One thing is certain…
Pornhub’s map of blocked territories is expanding a lot faster than the list of places where anyone’s found a solution that actually works.
The age verification debate is one of the most consequential regulatory battles in the adult industry right now – and it’s only getting bigger.
What’s your take? Are these laws protecting kids or just creating privacy nightmares for adults?
Let us know your thoughts…
