The porn industry is now managed like any other business, over the last 40 years it has been modernised, structurally uberised and adapted to the codes of work and marketing, invoices, tax payments, VAT, job boards, communication and advertising with, in theory associated bank accounts. Simple as… before.
Well that is before the sites, PornHub and YouPorn alone accounted for 2% of Internet bandwidth with hundreds of billions of videos posted each year. These figures are staggering, and one can only imagine the immensity of the financial transactions generated by the industry when we know that between 2010 and 2016, humanity watched the equivalent of 1.2 million years of pornographic videos.
In this respect, France is up there: with 92 billion X-rated videos watched in 2016 on the YouPorn platform, it became the 6th biggest consumer of X-rated videos in the world.
In December 2020, Mastercard and Visa’s decision to suspend their links and cut
connections with Pornhub accused of distributing child pornography and rape videos multiplied the momentum for cryptocurrency and alternative payment solutions.
Charities concerned with the protection of children, joined by organisations for support of minors such as e-Enfance and Voix de l’Enfant as well names in the digital world have taken up the cause, and have filed an application with the Tribunial Judiciare of Paris to denounce the simple accessibility for minors to pornographic content online.
A new law in France states that indeed, a declaration made simply by clicking a box, should not be considered as sufficient evidence that the user is over 18 years old. The majority of operators are not opposed to a possible blocking of these sites, like Altice (SFR) whose opinion is shared by Orange: “Access providers cannot take the initiative of a block without a court decision. We will obviously and diligently apply any decision of the judge that would ask us to block such sites”.
