Ofcom is today opening investigations into two pornographic services - Itai Tech Ltd and Score Internet Group LLC - under our age assurance enforcement programme.
Under the Online Safety Act, online services must ensure children cannot access pornographic content on their sites. In January, we wrote to online services that display or publish their own pornographic content to explain that the requirements for them to have highly effective age checks in place to protect children had come into force. We requested details of services’ plans for complying, along with an implementation timeline and a named point of contact.
Encouragingly, many services confirmed that they are implementing, or have plans to implement, age assurance on around 1,300 sites. A small number of services chose to block UK users from accessing their sites, rather than putting age checks in place.
Certain services failed to respond to our request and have not taken any steps to implement highly effective age assurance to protect children from pornography.
We are today opening investigations into Itai Tech Ltd - a service which runs the nudification site Undress.cc - and Score Internet Group LLC, which runs the site Scoreland.com. Both sites appear to have no highly effective age assurance in place and are potentially in breach of the Online Safety Act and their duties to protect children from pornography.
Next steps
We will provide an update on both investigations on our website in due course, along with details of any further investigations launched under this enforcement programme
Services which allow user-generated pornographic content – known as Part 3 services – are covered by a different part of the Online Safety Act, and must introduce highly effective age checks from July.