Open
Duties under the Online Safety Act 2023 to protect children from encountering pornographic content through the use of highly effective age assurance.
16 January 2025
From time to time Ofcom may open a programme of work, or “enforcement programme”, to examine a problem or concern that relates to a particular group of stakeholders, or to a whole sector.
One of our priorities for the new Online Safety regime is to promote the implementation of robust age assurance by adult services, so that children are protected from pornographic content.
Relevant Legal Provision: Section 81 of the Online Safety Act 2023
Our correspondence with part 5 services in January explained that the highly effective age assurance duties had come into force and requested that these services provide details of their compliance plans with a timeline for implementation and a named point of contact.
Around 40 part 5 services initially responded providing details of a number of highly effective age assurance methods they were planning on implementing on around 1,300 sites including (but not limited to) facial age estimation, credit card payment walls and safe for work landing pages. Many services are taking a multi layered approach using a combination of these solutions.
We have also seen examples of a small number of services that have chosen to geo-block the UK to ensure that children cannot access their sites.
Reassuringly, most of the largest services in the part 5 sector have confirmed that they are implementing or have plans to implement age assurance imminently and we will be monitoring those services to ensure they fulfil those plans and will be reviewing trends where we see spikes in user numbers to ensure that highly effective age assurance is in place.
However, there are some services that have failed to respond to Ofcom’s request and do not appear to have taken any steps to implement highly effective age assurance. Therefore, we have taken the decision to open two investigations.
We have opened an investigation into Itai Tech Ltd, (in relation to the ‘nudification’ site, Undress.cc), and Score Internet Group LLC (in relation to one of their studio sites, Scoreland.com). Both services do not appear to have taken steps to implement highly effective age assurance on their services, as required under section 81 of the Online Safety Act.
Ofcom’s investigations will examine whether there are reasonable grounds to believe that each of the companies has failed, or is failing, to comply with its duties under section 81 in Part 5 of the Online Safety Act 2023 (the ‘Act’) to protect children from encountering pornographic content through the use of highly effective age assurance.
We will provide an update on these investigations in due course. Ofcom’s Online Safety Enforcement Guidance sets out how Ofcom will normally approach enforcement under the Act. This includes our approach to information gathering and analysis and the procedural steps we must take to fairly determine the outcome of the investigation.
Where we identify compliance failures, we can impose fines of up to £18m or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue (whichever is greater). In the most serious cases of non-compliance, and where appropriate given the risks of harm to individuals in the UK, we can seek a court order to require third parties to take action to disrupt the business of the provider. This may require third parties (such as providers of payment or advertising services, or Internet Service Providers) to withdraw services from, or block access to, a regulated service in the UK.
Since January, as part of our work to ensure that Part 5 services are taking steps to comply with the duty to implement highly effective age assurance on their sites, we have written to Part 3 services to inform them of the same duty, which will apply to them from 25 July 2025.
We contacted hundreds of Part 3 user-to-user services on 25 April, whose principal purpose is to host user generated pornography. We have published this open letter advising of the forthcoming requirements that will apply to these sites, in order to allow them time to take the necessary steps to achieve compliance.
On 17 January 2025, we wrote to hundreds of providers, collectively covering thousands of sites that publish or display pornographic content, to inform them of their obligations under Part 5 of the Online Safety Act to implement Highly Effective Age Assurance (HEAA) to prevent children from accessing pornographic content.
We asked them to respond with details of their plans to meet their obligations to impose HEAA on their sites and anticipated timescales.
The deadline for responses was between 3 and 6 March 2025. So far, we have had positive engagement from across the sector and a number of providers have implemented HEAA in response to our programme. We are reviewing compliance plans and implementation timescales for other services in scope of these duties.
We are also assessing the HEAA measures of services who have not responded and a number of services have been referred to our enforcement team for further review. We will assess such sites and consider in the coming weeks whether formal enforcement action is appropriate. Details of any new investigations will be published on our website.
Part 5 of the Online Safety Act 2025 imposes duties (Part 5 duties) on regulated providers of pornographic content to ensure, through the use of age verification or age estimation (or both), that children (under 18) are not normally able to encounter pornographic content. Such age verification measures must be highly effective at correctly determining whether a particular user is a child. This duty will come into force on 17 January 2025.
Ofcom has opened an enforcement programme into age assurance measures across the adult sector, which will initially focus on regulated providers’ compliance with the Part 5 duties.
Action we are taking:
From the 17 January, we will be writing to all service providers that display or publish pornographic content (Part 5 Service Providers) to inform them of their obligations under the OSA and to request confirmation of the age assurance provisions they are implementing to achieve compliance with their duties under Part 5 of the OSA. A copy of the letter can be foundon our public correspondence page.
Our Supervision team, which leads engagement with regulated services, will also be engaging directly with the adult industry to support compliance. This will include both one to one regular engagement with the largest or riskiest services, as well as hosting and attending adult industry conferences to raise awareness of Ofcom and the new regulations and developing creative communications that will effectively inform pornography services about their obligations.