Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, whether online pornography operators based outside of the UK will be required to meet the requirement to provide a duty of care as proposed in the Online Harms White Paper Initial Consultation Response.

We published our Online Harms Initial Consultation Response in February this year. Under the new regulatory framework, the duty of care will apply to all companies that provide services which facilitate the sharing of user generated content or user interactions. Where pornography sites have such functionalities (including video and image sharing, commenting and live streaming) they will be subject to the duty of care.

The duty of care will apply to all companies who provide services to UK users. Noting the particularly serious nature of some of the harms in scope and the global nature of many online services, the White Paper proposed that there should be a level playing field between those companies that have a legal presence in the UK, and those that operate from overseas.