Controversial law on age verification for adult content abandoned

The commencement of part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017 was repeatedly delayed, having originally been set for April 2018.

Digital Secretary Nicky Morgan has now said the law will “not be commencing”, and its objectives will instead be “delivered through our proposed online harms regulatory regime”.

The government is bringing forward legislation to establish a duty of care on companies to improve online safety, overseen by an independent regulator with strong enforcement powers to deal with non-compliance.

The decision has been cautiously welcomed by civil liberties groups who warned that the proposed system could have risked users’ privacy and would have been difficult to enforce.

Neil Brown, managing director of law firm decoded.legal, told Sky News earlier this year: “The legislation can be used to compel ISPs to block access to non-compliant websites.

“Worryingly, this does not involve a court, and it expressly permits ‘overblocking’ - the blocking of ‘material other than the offending material’. It is highly unlikely that this is consistent with human rights law.”

The scrapped law would have required commercial providers of online pornography to carry out robust age verification checks on users to ensure that they are 18 or over.

Websites that failed to implement age verification technology would have faced having payment services withdrawn or being blocked for UK users.

The checks would have included the use of traditional ID documents (for example, credit cards or passports), mobile phones without adult filters, or “digital IDs” or cards purchased over-the-counter in shops.