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

To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have to bring into force all of the provisions of Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017 to ensure that children are not exposed to online pornography.

The Government announced in October 2019 that it will not commence the age verification provisions of Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017 and instead deliver these protections through our wider online harms regulatory proposals.

Protecting children is at the heart of our plans to transform the online experience for people in the UK and the strongest protections in the online harms framework will be for children. All companies in scope will be required to assess whether children are likely to access their services, and if so, provide additional protections for children using them. Through the online harms framework, we will be able to go further than the Digital Economy Act’s focus on online pornography on commercial adult sites. We will be able to protect children from a broader range of harmful content and activity, across a wider range of sites.

Under our proposals, we expect companies to use age assurance or age verification technologies to prevent children from accessing services which pose the highest risk of harm to children, such as online pornography. The online harms regime will capture both the most visited pornography sites and pornography on social media, therefore covering the vast majority of sites where children are most likely to be exposed to pornography. Taken together we expect this to bring into scope more online pornography currently accessible to children than would have been covered by the narrower scope of the Digital Economy Act.