When it comes to regulating Big Porn, an investigation is better late than never. The European Commission is currently looking into four large adult content websites — Pornhub, Stripchat, XNXX and XVideos — over concerns they are failing to protect minors online. The Commission argues that the current safeguarding measures, or lack thereof, do not comply with the Digital Services Act, and has threatened the sites with interim controls or fines of up to 6% of their global revenue unless they can guarantee a high level of safety, security and privacy for minors.

Given the size of these companies (Pornhub is the tenth-most-visited website in the world, with over 115 million visits a day), taking down Big Porn was always near-impossible. Yet a fine is not the critical stone the EU Commission thinks it is: it is merely a slap on the wrist. MindGeek, Pornhub’s parent company, is a digital juggernaut: it owns almost 100 websites that collectively consume more bandwidth than Facebook, Amazon and Twitter/X combined. It has an estimated annual revenue of over $97 billion, and so can easily absorb the financial hit.

A fundamental problem with these porn sites is their business model: they are “tube” sites, which means that, like YouTube, they allow users to upload content and watch it for free, and then monetise the user engagement through advertising. There are several issues with this. The first is that IDs are not required in order for videos to get approved and published (you don’t even have to give your name or address), which means it is incredibly easy to share non-consensual content. As performer Cherie DeVille says in the Pornhub documentary Money Shot: “If you let anyone upload anything, you’re going to get anyone uploading anything.”

Another issue is that profits come from user engagement, and so these websites algorithmically incentivise users to watch for as long as possible, as often as possible, and so deliberately expose viewers to increasingly hardcore and extreme content. The moderation process is also woefully inadequate: in 2020, a class action against Pornhub found that the site had only one person reviewing flagged videos just five days a week, with a backlog of over 700,000 videos.

The third issue is that the “tube” business model allows porn companies to forego responsibility for the content they publish because they are “hosts” rather than creators. Despite evidence to the contrary, they can maintain that all their performers are behaving consensually, and therefore calls to shut down these sites are treated as pearl-clutching puritanical propaganda. These corporations also use otherwise genuine fears around freedom of speech, internet privacy and data security to frame suggestions such as age-verification software as surveillance and censorship.

As we have seen with Australia’s social media ban for under-16s, it is very easy to say you are doing something without actually outlining in detail how you will do it. The EU needs more than financial threats: it needs firm legal action, because unless we tackle their core business model, these sites are never going to put children’s safety above profits.

We know that prohibitions can and do work: when Louisiana passed a law requiring age verification for online pornography, Pornhub saw an 80% decline in site traffic. Brussels is also currently developing an EU-wide app which would allow users to verify their age without giving away additional personal information. This is a promising start, but the battle against Big Porn has only just begun.

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Kristina Murkett is a freelance writer and English teacher.

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