> There were so many people saying that this isn’t going to work.

Yes, and we were right.

It was billed as something that most adults would accept. It's not plausible that 77 percent of Pornhub's UK traffic came from non-adults.

It has therefore failed. Obviously a huge number of adults did not accept it, and either went around it or stopped using the site. What they did not do was to comply with the supposedly "measured, reasonable and non-intrusive" AV measures. They accepted costs and inconveniences to avoid that.

It was billed as something that would only affect children. It has in fact affected many adults. That means it has failed.

Of course, many of the 77 percent have probably moved to VPNs (or other sites) rather than actually not using Pornhub... which means they were only inconvenienced, not deprived of porn or even of Pornhub.

But those approaches are just as available to non-adults as to adults. Although the AV nonsense probably did actually deter some number of underage users, you can't know what that number was. It would be possible for literally every single underage user to have simply switched to a VPN. The 77 percent number tells you exactly nothing about how many children have been deterred from watching porn. Probably not very many.

So although this does give you proof of some of the ways it's failed, it does not give you any evidence that it's succeeded in anything at all.

That said, that kind of "success" is not the main issue. The main arguments against this AV stupidity were and are that it's not worth the huge costs in money, convenience, security, and privacy, and that it helps create machinery that can and probably will be abused for other purposes later. All of which are still absolutely true.

The article pretty clearly states that it’s likely this is at least partly attributable to VPN use.

Yeah, those people were apparently 100% correct and this was a colossal failure.

Instead of large, accountable providers, now three quarters of their customers use vpns or switched to sites without age verification.

Yes indeed, and also worth bearing in mind that, particularly as this is a male-dominated forum, many of the people commenting here will be habitual porngraphy consumers who will have a negative view of any mechanism that gets in the way of their consumption.

What do you mean by worked? Worked to move people to other sources of porn or vpns?

It didn't work: https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2025/security/discord-admit...

I mean they're all just using VPNs… I'm sure the VPN companies love the policy but other than that I'm not sure what problem they solved.