This week, Aylo, the company that owns some of the largest pornographic pages, announced the Suspension of the Pornhub, YouPorn and Redtube service in Francein protest of the implementation of a new law.
The new legal text implements new age verification obligations for pornography distributors; measures that have been criticized as “dangerous” and “ineffective” and possibly contrary to privacy.
With the new law, which comes into force on June 7, companies will have to Require some type of identification to users They want to visit pages with pornography, to ensure that they are of legal age.
Among the possible methods to verify the age of a user of porn pages, is the National Identity Document, in addition to credit cardswhose data must be verified by an external entity.
Although the use of an external entity has been presented as a privacy measure, critics claim that in practice it could allow User data ends up to strangersfor example, for blackmail.
Aylo has announced the suspension of its services in France before the law enters into force, to “Communicate directly with the French what their government is avoiding saying”in reference to these possible privacy problems.
The suspension occurred on June 4, before the entry into force of the law, with the hope of Force the government to back down For popular protests.
Aylo asks other measures to be contemplated, such as verification on the device itself; It would be a system similar to the one proposed by the Government of Pedro Sánchez to identify Spanish users on the Internet.
However, the first consequence of the blockade has been very different from the expected protests. And is that the suspension of the service in France of these services has caused a Historical growth in the installation of VPN services.
This has been revealed by Protonvpn, one of the most popular VPN services, whose records fired 1,000% Just half an hour after Pornhub block to France launched.
It is surprising growth, which has been repeated in other VPN services that offer more complete free options; ProtonvPN allows you to connect 1 device at a time at medium speed.
Growth of ProtonVPN users during Pornhub blockade in France
The free android
According to Protonvpnhas noticed new user growth Greater than when Tiktok blocked access to Americans Last January as a result of a law that forced him to be bought by a country company.
A VPN is a service that redirects user connection to private servers, which serve as intermediaries and are those that connect to the final page or service, obfuscating user data.
The great advantage of a VPN is found in privacysince the page does not receive data such as the IP address of the user that is visiting them, but of the intermediary servers. In addition, normally VPN connections are encrypted.
That is the reason why VPNs have become the objective of copyright owners in their fight against IPTV Pirates, since they allow access to these services even after being normally blocked.
Another very common utility of VPN is connect to services from other countriesfor example, to skip the blockages imposed by governments; Ironically, the situation here is the opposite, with users skipping the blockade of the website.
Instead of complying with the law, Aylo’s pages have chosen to block the access of users who connect from France; Hence, users use a VPN to connect from another country and skip the blockade.
