More than three million Australians access Pornhub every day. Well, they used to.
That was before the morning of Monday, March 9, when something unusual happened to Pornhub’s Australian homepage.
Where explicit content once loaded within seconds, visitors were greeted instead with podcasts. Lifestyle segments. The site’s own branded merchandise. A kind of neutered, G-rated simulacrum of the world’s most-visited adult website, served to a country whose regulators had finally decided to draw a line.
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Traffic on Pornhub – by far the nation’s most popular source of pornographic content – flatlined almost immediately.
The eSafety Commissioner’s Age-Restricted Material Codes have arrived. And the adult entertainment industry’s most powerful player has responded, not with compliance but with a prodigious dummy spit.
The war is just beginning and will play out over the coming months and years. And it is finally forcing Australia to reckon with a question it has spent a decade avoiding: what has a generation of young men been learning from the internet’s most popular classroom?
How we got here
Australia spent the better part of a decade watching evidence accumulate and doing relatively little.
What was probably the first serious national conversation about children and online pornography began nearly a decade ago, in 2017, when researchers began publishing findings about the age at which Australian children were first encountering explicit content. It was younger, and more accidental, than almost anyone had assumed.
What then changed the political calculus was not a single event but an accumulation. The 2019 Christchurch massacre – livestreamed on Facebook, mirrored across platforms within minutes – made the proposition that the internet could govern itself look untenable. The internet was once celebrated for its ‘Wild West’ nature – a colourful place where anything was possible – but it has long lost its innocence. The Covid pandemic accelerated children’s screen time, and the algorithmic radicalisation of teenage boys became a mainstream concern. High-profile cases involving non-consensual intimate images – many hosted on the platforms now blocking Australian users in protest – made the gap between platform rhetoric and platform behaviour impossible to ignore.
It was the Albanese government’s world-first under-16 social media ban, passed in late 2025, that marked the nation’s first major assertion that the tech industry’s social licence had limits. The age verification codes, which came into effect this month, are the second. Australia is not alone: roughly half of US states have enacted or are advancing similar laws, the UK moved in July 2025, and Brazil is next.
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, as she often does, draws real-life analogies to make the intent difficult to disagree with. “We don’t allow children to walk into bars or bottle shops, adult stores or casinos,” she says. “But when it comes to online spaces, there are no such safeguards.” It’s not a perfect analogy. A bottle shop does not follow a child home and offer personalised recommendations. But in terms of political logic, it worked.
The rules and the revolt
Aylo – the Montreal-based private equity company behind Pornhub, RedTube, YouPorn and Tube8 – was ready. It had watched the same confrontation play out in Britain, where it claimed Pornhub’s traffic dropped 77 per cent following similar rules, before blocking UK visitors entirely. Now it was Australia’s turn.
Platforms must now verify users are over 18, using mechanisms ranging from photo ID and facial age estimation to credit card checks and third-party vendors. Non-compliance carries penalties of up to $49.5 million per breach. For free porn sites built on frictionless anonymous access, it’s a change bordering on existential. Aylo understood this perfectly, which is why its arguments about protecting users from privacy harms are so difficult to accept with a straight face.
Canada’s privacy watchdog found the company broke the law by allowing intimate images – uploaded by an ex-boyfriend without a woman’s consent – to spread across its platforms. More damning: Aylo’s own director acknowledged that content uploaders who don’t appear in material “fail to provide the required identification and consent forms for depicted individuals in approximately 70 per cent of cases.”
That’s nearly three quarters. And this is the company lecturing Australia about the dangers of identity data.
eSafety says it has the tools to respond. Its multi-code architecture was designed to avoid single points of failure: if a non-compliant site continues serving children, for example, the regulator can pressure Apple and Google through the App Store code to block them.
What the VPN surge really means
Within hours, two VPN products had surged over 100 places in Australian app store rankings. Critics reached for this as proof the laws were already failing.
That argument deserves more scrutiny, according to Swinburne media expert Dr Belinda Barnet.
“It is wrong to assume it is kids downloading VPNs,” Barnet says. “It is just as likely to be adults wanting to avoid identifying themselves.” Those adults, she warns, may be trading one privacy risk for a considerably larger one. “There is a profound irony that users trying to avoid sharing data with Pornhub might instead share it with a random cheap VPN company. They likely sell to data brokers. If you are not paying for a service, this usually means you are the product.”
Civil liberties advocates have described age verification as tying users’ “most sensitive and immutable data” – think names, faces, birthdays, home addresses – to their online activity, representing a structural shift in how identity becomes permanently bound to behaviour online.
What the research says
About 10 per cent of children have accidentally encountered pornography online by the age of 10, rising to almost 30 per cent by 13, according to eSafety’s own data.
For boys in particular, the developmental stakes are the subject of mounting evidence. The prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain responsible for judgment, impulse control and distinguishing fantasy from reality – does not fully develop until the mid-twenties. Studies from Britain, the United States and Scandinavia have found associations between heavy adolescent pornography use and distorted beliefs about consent, unrealistic expectations, and diminished empathy toward female partners. And the most commonly accessed content is not vanilla; porn sites are engineered to escalate. A curiosity search often proceeds rapidly, through recommendation engines optimised for engagement, toward increasingly extreme material. The algorithmic logic is identical to the one that radicalised teenage boys toward political extremism on YouTube.
Nikki Justice is an award-winning comedian, mother of three and top 0.2 per cent global OnlyFans creator. She says she supports the end goal but that it’s being tackled in completely the wrong way.
“The conversation gets framed as a moral debate about pornography. In reality, it’s a technology and policy problem,” she says. “And if policy ignores how the internet actually behaves, the only thing these laws will verify is how easy it is for the internet to find a workaround.”
The education alternative
Cindy Gallop is a British-American advertising executive who founded MakeLoveNotPorn, a platform she describes as “pro-sex, pro-porn and pro-knowing the difference”.
She is also, unexpectedly, aligned with Aylo on the core question – not because she shares its commercial interests, but because she believes the laws will fail by design.
“Legislation doesn’t work,” she says. “Mandated guardrails don’t work. Giant tech has zero interest in installing those. The only solution is what I’ve been telling parents for years: what preserves your child’s innocence for as long as possible is educating them as early as possible about sex – not the opposite.”
Her proposed alternative is not abstinence from the internet but confrontation with it. Gallop argues that the impulse to block and restrict is itself part of the problem – that the shame and secrecy with which Western culture surrounds sex is precisely what makes pornography so powerful and so poorly processed by the young people who encounter it.
“When you bring sex out of the shadows and into the sunlight,” she said, “you enable so many solutions.”
Gallop has spent 11 years attempting to build MakeLoveNotPorn Academy, a platform aggregating the world’s best sex education content, and describes a familiar pattern of obstruction: investors who won’t engage, banks that won’t service her, social platforms that disable accounts despite strictly non-explicit content policies. “I’ve battled every day of the past 17 years,” she says. “There are many female founders like me building educational sexual wellness ventures. No investor will touch us.”
The voices left unheard
The debate has proceeded largely without the people it will most immediately affect.
Mish Pony is chief executive of Scarlet Alliance, the nation’s peak body for sex workers. She says the laws will produce a displacement effect: when compliant platforms restrict access, consumers move to offshore sites less likely to check who appears in the videos, less likely to respond to takedown requests, more likely to host content uploaded without anyone’s consent.
“That leaves sex workers not earning income from their content,” Pony said, “with obvious flow-on effects – lower earnings and being pushed into working in ways that are less safe.”
Blue Mountains-based sex worker Jenna Love points to a deep irony: regulations designed to protect women from exploitative content may well redirect traffic toward the sites where exploitation is most prevalent.
“Those sites have all of our content stolen and uploaded without our consent,” she says. “We’re not getting any benefit, and most of the time we don’t even know it’s up there.”
Both say it’s overly simplistic to argue that porn is inherently bad, even for young people. That it can be educational and helpful in the right circumstances.
“There’s often talk about protecting women and children,” Pony says. “I’m always asking – which women and children? Because it’s certainly not the women who work in the sex industry. That’s how we feed our kids.”
eSafety said consultation with Scarlet Alliance had begun in 2021 and continued through roundtables, Senate inquiries and jointly produced regulatory guidance. The Senate inquiry made no recommendations on the codes. Both things seem true: there was an extensive process, and a community that still feels unheard.
Where to from here
Globally, the trajectory is pointing one way. Industry analysts predict the spread of age verification laws will push platforms toward systems that verify age once and carry that credential across services – a persistent digital identity that travels with the user. For adults, that means an internet where identity verification is no longer occasional friction but a permanent layer of everyday access. Your iPhone or your laptop will know how old you are, instead of every website needing to ask.
Whether that future is five years away or 15, it is coming.
The more immediate question is what we want young Australians to understand about sex, consent and intimacy, and whether we are prepared to be honest about the degree to which the existing arrangement – free and instant and endlessly escalating – has already shaped those understandings in ways that may take a generation to untangle.
Gallop says that every day she hears from parents who have found their children watching pornography and are desperate for somewhere to direct them instead – toward honest, healthy, human depictions of sex that bear some relationship to actual intimacy.
“More and more parents are clear-sighted about what their kids are encountering,” she says. “They know the problem. They’re desperate for the solution.”
Age verification is a start. The question now turns to what gets built above it: the education, the media literacy, the conversations between parents and children.
That work is not in any of the codes. And it is, by some distance, the harder ask.
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.From our partners
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
