They can fine all they want, if the company doesn't have any entity in said territory they can just ignore it. What Ofcom succeeded to achieve though is to deter more and more foreign IT companies to ever expand and create jobs in the UK.
I'd like to believe that technical people at OFCOM actually know the impossibility of what they're being asked to implement but are just going through the motions, so their bosses/politicians can put out pointless press releases like this.
Trying to restrict access to content on the Internet by requiring "robust" age verification was never going to achieve the goals they stated, and has a number of predictable (and already seen) negative side-effects.
Unfortunately governments all over the place seem intent on continuing this type of regulation, I presume so they can be seen to be doing something. Good time to be in the VPN game, I'd guess.
Heavy tangent: I finally tested the age verification thing in France: it's fine. I heavily dislike the biometric verification, it feels it can be gamed easily and in my opinion is dangerous, but the e-Id/bank verification seems solid.
Weirdly, it might makes 'local' porn site like Dorcel who used to ask for credit cards for age verification (because of prior regulation not followed by mindgeek) more popular in the long run.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 31.1 ms ] threadTrying to restrict access to content on the Internet by requiring "robust" age verification was never going to achieve the goals they stated, and has a number of predictable (and already seen) negative side-effects.
Unfortunately governments all over the place seem intent on continuing this type of regulation, I presume so they can be seen to be doing something. Good time to be in the VPN game, I'd guess.
Weirdly, it might makes 'local' porn site like Dorcel who used to ask for credit cards for age verification (because of prior regulation not followed by mindgeek) more popular in the long run.