The UK’s Online Safety Act 2023 is a law to make the online space safer for children and young people. Since July 2025, the Online Safety Act requires pornography sites to provide effective forms of age verification/assurance to help stop children stumbling across harmful material. Consumers need to provide proof of age (18 years and over) before gaining access to legal pornography. Self-regulation of the industry didn’t work and children had widespread, easy access to hardcore pornography resulting in a range of mental and physical health problems for some along with social and educational challenges too. As recently as 2025 a national study in Greece found 66% of primary school children had a social media account which they had obtained by the simple expedient of declaring a false age. Ninety-five percent of people seeking help from clinics for problematic pornography use started before the age of 12 years.
How effective is the new law?
Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, has lead responsibility for the Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA). The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has lead responsibility for enforcing the UK’s data protection laws. The ICO also has specific responsibility for enforcing the Children’s Code (aka the Age Appropriate Design Code), an important global first now much copied elsewhere. ICO and Ofcom have established a formal relationship underpinned by a memorandum of understanding.
Ofcom
In the past eight months Ofcom has launched a series of investigations into potentially non-compliant sites. It seems to have put its efforts into the largest sites, and towards companies that own a large number of pornographic websites.
The reaction of the larger pornography suppliers for the UK market has been varied. Some have put in place effective age checks. Others, including, Pornhub, which is often been the largest supplier in the UK, have been less obliging. Pornhub has officially withdrawn from the UK market for new customers. Existing UK users who created and verified accounts before 2 February 2026 currently still have access.
Fines
Substantial fines have now been levied on two major suppliers who have been judged to not have effective age checks in place.
In February 2026, biggest fine of £1.35 million was given to 8579 LLC. This follows on from a £1 million fine on AVS Group Ltd in December 2025. In both cases Ofcom also authorised smaller daily fines when the companies did not respond to formal correspondence from Ofcom.
These developments show that the UK government, through Ofcom, can impose fines. However, we are still waiting to see if the companies involved will ever pay them. Here is what the cases tell us.
AVS Group Limited operates at least 18 adult sites available in the UK. The company is registered in the small Caribbean country of Belize, adjoining Mexico and Guatemala. Multiple sources state that the adult sites operated by AVS Group sit under a parent or associated entity called TubeCorporate, which is registered in Belize and acts as the adult content publishing platform behind the group. Some UK journalists have suggested that the group is mostly or wholly owned by a UK citizen. Their research notes that the Belize address used by TubeCorporate/AVS appears in the Panama Papers and is associated with large numbers of shell entities, consistent with a secrecy‑focused, offshore registration model.
8579 LLC seems to be a US-based operator of multiple pornography sites which uses Cloudflare to obscure its hosting locations. It does not respond to requests for information from either the regulator or the journalists who have approached it for comment.
Hidden Ownership
The key issue in each case is that the ultimate owner of the site is remote from the UK. They operate in an environment where they readily transfer their sites from one legal owner to another, or to another version of themselves. This use of shell companies makes it, of course, deliberately very difficult for a regulator like Ofcom to manage. These companies also tend to be very nimble. They don’t invest in things like offices or physical infrastructure. They usually exist as online only entities, with the website being nothing more than a domain name linked to servers with a supply of pornography videos. And mhey are monetised through third-party software to create revenue streams from advertising and pay-per-click interactions. The corporate structure is designed to maximise secrecy and generally to avoid paying tax.
Effective?
It would be remarkable if Ofcom ever succeed in enforcing the penalties and receiving the fines. The most Ofcom is likely to do is to slightly disturb their revenue flow while they restructure themselves into a new form. Meanwhile, children in the UK are less protected. We hope that Ofcom will use stronger tools to block the sites entirely from delivering content to UK consumers.
Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)
Fine
The ICO has just fined Reddit £14.47 million.
To quote from the ICO press statement:
Our investigation found that Reddit:
- Failed to apply any robust age assurance mechanism and therefore did not have a lawful basis for processing the personal information of children under the age of 13.
- Failed to carry out a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) to assess and mitigate risks to children before January 2025.
These failures meant Reddit was using children’s data unlawfully, potentially exposing them to inappropriate and harmful content.
The ICO estimated that in 2024, approximately 537,000 children visited the Reddit platform in the UK, with around 226,000 of these being under 13, the latter being the stated minimum age for anyone in the UK joining any part of Reddit.
It is understood Reddit have now introduced better, acceptable ways of determining whether or not a child meets its minimum age requirement. The £14 million fine relates to their historic failure to meet the OSA’s new requirements.
Parents and schools need to work more on education about porn risks to help pupils recognise for themselves the many risks porn use delivers. See our free lesson plans for school and free parents’ guide. It takes a village to raise a child. This is true even more so today when so much activity goes on behind a screen. Let’s engage more with our children, show them how to control behaviour by being a good role model, and give them a chance to blossom. This is a team effort.
