PARIS — The president of French media regulator Arcom revealed on Thursday that the agency plans to escalate its enforcement of age verification rules to include smaller adult sites, starting in late 2025 or early 2026.
Since Arcom began enforcing age verification requirements under France’s Security and Regulation of the Digital Space (SREN) law, the agency has focused on a handful of high-traffic sites, including Pornhub, YouPorn, xHamster, XVideos, XNXX, xHamsterLive and TNAFlix.
Between the end of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, however, Arcom will launch the next phase of its age verification enforcement efforts for adult sites, this time taking aim at sites “a little less frequented” than its initial targets, Arcom President Martin Ajdari revealed during a speech delivered at a public event titled “Minors Online: What Risks, What Protections?”
Arcom plans on “methodically applying the same procedure” to the smaller sites as it has done with larger ones: investigating compliance with age verification rules, issuing formal notices and, if necessary, blocking or delisting noncompliant sites, Ajdari said.
“Arcom’s mission is not to intervene on the content itself but to ensure that platforms established in France respect their obligations,” he stated. “Today, all the targeted sites have either been blocked (one of them), or have decided to shut down their service in France (this is the case for Pornhub and YouPorn), or have complied.
“In just a few months, we have changed the situation, without of course claiming to have solved everything,” he added.
Ajdari noted that Arcom has pursued its mission despite “numerous legal proceedings.”
Early this year, Cyprus-based Hammy Media, which operates xHamster, challenged the application of SREN’s age verification regulations to sites based in other EU countries. The Paris Administrative Court temporarily suspended enforcement of those rules, but French authorities appealed to the Council of State, which dismissed the company’s objections.
On Sept. 18, in a case involving WebGroup Czech Republic, which operates XVideos.com, and NKL Associates, which operates XNXX.com, an advocate general of the European Union’s Court of Justice on Thursday advised France’s highest administrative court to rule that France may require pornographic websites based in other EU states to implement age verification in accordance with French law.
