Which countries passed laws requiring age verification for adult sites but faced judicial blocks or delays by 2025?
Executive summary
Three jurisdictions — France, Germany and multiple U.S. states — passed age‑verification requirements for pornographic or online services but encountered court challenges, enforcement delays or contested implementation before 2025; reporting shows France’s law triggered site blocks and high‑court actions, German blocking orders prompted litigation and confusion, and numerous American state statutes were met with injunctions and ongoing federal litigation [1] [2] [3].
1. France: a law on the books that immediately ran into legal fireworks
France passed a robust age‑verification regime for pornographic sites that empowered the regulator Arcom to order blocks and sanctions, and that law prompted telecom blocking orders and litigation late in 2024 and into 2025 as sites and platforms reacted — for example, Aylo (Pornhub’s owner) temporarily blocked French users and the country’s courts issued orders for providers to block non‑compliant sites while implementation standards continued to be litigated [1] [2].
2. Germany: court orders, regulator action and industry pushback left enforcement muddled
German authorities and regional media regulators sought to enforce age‑verification under longstanding youth‑protection statutes, with at least one order targeting Aylo and directional moves to require blocking of non‑compliant sites; those steps prompted lawsuits and challenges from telecoms and other defendants, producing uncertainty about whether blocking orders were legally sustainable and delaying consistent nationwide enforcement [1] [2].
3. United States: many state laws passed, many courts hit the brakes
Since 2024 dozens of U.S. state statutes or measures required age verification for access to adult content or social platforms, but the rollout was met by immediate constitutional litigation and widespread injunctions — advocacy groups and tech defendants won temporary blocks in multiple cases and the Electronic Frontier Foundation documented that “many” such laws were swiftly blocked in courts as of 2025 even while the broader policy wave advanced [3] [4].
4. The United Kingdom and implementation delays: policy ambition not the same as judicial defeat
The UK repeatedly considered and revised proposals on mandatory age checks for pornography — early versions faced delays and privacy concerns, and only later did Ofcom move to require “strong age checks” under the Online Safety Act with deadlines in 2025; reporting shows earlier plans were postponed or reworked rather than simply struck down by courts, so the UK’s story is one of regulatory delay and technical debate more than of a single judicial block [5] [6].
5. Patterns, trade‑offs and the litigation playbook
Across these examples the common dynamic is predictable: legislatures set tough rules to protect minors, regulators seek blocking or sanctions, industry and service providers fight back on legal, technical and privacy grounds, and courts become the arbitration point — France saw immediate blocking orders and site self‑exclusion, Germany saw regulator orders meet telecom lawsuits, and in the U.S. many state laws met constitutional injunctions that paused enforcement pending deeper litigation [1] [2] [3].
6. What the sources do — and do not — prove
Reporting clearly documents that France, Germany and multiple U.S. states enacted age‑verification rules and that each encountered judicial or implementation obstacles as of 2025, but available sources do not provide a definitive catalogue of every national litigation outcome or the final, court‑tested constitutional rulings for every law; the cited coverage shows disputes, injunctions and implementation delays rather than uniform judicial reversals or final appellate decisions across the board [1] [2] [3].