the government wants to strengthen the powers of Arcom to protect minors

2023-05-07 09:17:47

The goal is to be able to better fight against the scourge of the exposure of minors to online pornographic content. The government will entrust the Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication (Arcom) with the power to order, without the assistance of a judge, the blocking by operators and the delisting of pornographic sites which do not prevent minors to access their content, indeed announced, Sunday, May 7, the Minister Delegate for Digital Jean-Noël Barrot to Agence-France Presse.

“It is urgent to remove our children from the flood of porn images[graphiques] on the internet and uphold the law once and for all”did he declare.

The measure will be part of the bill to “secure and [à] regulate the digital space » which will be presented Wednesday in the Council of Ministers, then examined in the Senate this summer and at the start of the school year in the National Assembly. This also provides for the banishment from social networks of cyberstalkers already convicted by the courts, and a power of formal notice also entrusted to Arcom to stop the dissemination on the Internet of media banned in the European Union.

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Insufficient measures so far

Created in January 2022 from the merger of the CSA and Hadopi, Arcom is responsible for ensuring that pornographic sites comply with their obligation to verify the age of their visitors, which can no longer be a simple declaration of majority since a law of 2020.

But the authority can for the moment only send formal notices in the event of an infringement then, if it does not get a return, seize the president of the Paris court to order a blocking by the telecom operators.

A first procedure aimed in particular at the giants of the Pornhub or XVideos sector must lead to a court decision on July 7. However, the blocking is not granted, these sites contesting the request on the grounds that the law is not sufficiently precise on the methods of age verification.

“It is provided in the text that Arcom publish guidelines” to define the contours of such a system, specified Sunday Mr. Barrot, which is based on a report of four senators who denounced the excesses of this industry. Arcom agents may also be sworn in to find violations.

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Emmanuel Macron’s long-term promise

The government thus wishes to achieve effective age verification on pornographic sites, or their blocking, before the end of the year, four years after Emmanuel Macron’s promise to stop their access to minors.

“In 2023, it’s the end of access to pornographic sites for our children”, declared in February Jean-Noël Barrot in an interview at Parisianto announce the work of the government now being finalized.

He specified that all Internet sites for adults “must comply with it under penalty of seeing the distribution prohibited on the national territory”. According to him, “France will be the first country in the world to propose a solution like this”.

Since the end of March, a “double anonymity” age verification to ensure the age of Internet users accessing pornographic sites, in order to block access to minors, is in particular at work.

Read also: Pornographic sites: a “double-anonymous” age verification tested at the end of March

The World with AFP