Access of minors to pornographic sites: justice offers mediation – CNEWS

The Paris court examined on Tuesday the request for blocking of five pornographic sites accessible to minors and proposed, in this context, to organize mediation in order to find a way to prevent them from accessing X content on the Internet. No blocking, but mediation. The Paris court proposed this Tuesday, September 6 to organize a mediation in order to find a way to prevent minors from accessing pornography on the Internet, to the chagrin of Arcom, which asked telecom operators to immediately block from several sites. Concretely and according to our information, the hearing of the day thus finally addressed only a question of procedure. The hearing on the merits of the case, meanwhile, will take place later. However, it should not be held before November or even December. “The court considers that the present case includes eligibility criteria for mediation”, declared in this context during an eventful hearing its first vice-president Fabrice Vert, promoter of this method of conflict resolution. A formal decision expected on Thursday The decision to order the parties to negotiate will be formally taken on Thursday, but the choice of economist Bruno Deffains as mediator has already been put forward. “The position of the regulator is not to lead workshops to help pornographic sites carry out their activity”, regretted the lawyers of Arcom (ex-CSA), which was assigned by law of July 30, 2020 the power to request the blocking of a pornographic site if it finds that it is accessible by minors. The Cypriot company MG Freesites, publisher of the Pornhub platform, one of the five sites targeted in this procedure, has for its part filed a priority question of constitutionality (QPC) which calls into question the legitimacy of Arcom to act. . The court will decide on October 4 whether or not to send this QPC to the Court of Cassation. If this was not the case, a new civil hearing would be organized to examine the case on the merits. A similar QPC was proposed in a joint administrative procedure. During the debates, the lawyers representing Pornhub, Tukif, XHamster, Xvideos, Xnxx, targeted in December 2021 by a formal notice from Arcom and which are among the most visited sites in France, tried to prove their goodwill. “None of the technical solutions that we have tested have proven satisfactory,” pleaded Elsa Rodrigues, lawyer for MG Freesites (MindGeek group), adding to wait for the “guidelines” announced in December by the regulator. “There is no consensus on technical measures. (…) No one tells us what to do”, she continued. Recent reports from the Cnil and Peren, the government’s center of expertise, have recalled the risks associated with existing majority verification solutions offered by the industry, while paving the way for a system based on third-party trust. The government is also preparing with the telecoms industry and child protection associations a default parental control system on smartphones, which will be fixed by decree “within a few weeks or months”, indicated on Monday. the entourage of the Minister Delegate for Digital, Jean-Noël Barrot.