Ofcom Watch

Ofcom has commenced investigations into two pornographic services - Itai Tech Ltd and Score Internet Group LLC - under our age assurance enforcement programme.

Under the Online Safety Act, online services must ensure children cannot access pornographic content on their sites. In January, we wrote to online services that display or publish their own pornographic content to explain that the requirements for them to have highly effective age checks in place to protect children had come into force. We requested details of services' plans for complying, along with an implementation timeline and a named point of contact.

Encouragingly, many services confirmed that they are implementing, or have plans to implement, age assurance on around 1,300 sites. A small number of services chose to block UK users from accessing their sites, rather than putting age checks in place.

Certain services failed to respond to our request and have not taken any steps to implement highly effective age assurance to protect children from pornography.

We are today opening investigations into Itai Tech Ltd - a service which runs the nudification site Undress.cc - and Score Internet Group LLC, which runs the site Scoreland.com. Both sites appear to have no highly effective age assurance in place and are potentially in breach of the Online Safety Act and their duties to protect children from pornography. Next steps

We will provide an update on both investigations on our website in due course, along with details of any further investigations launched under this enforcement programme

 

Update: Low Scores

2nd July 2025. See article from ofcom.org.uk

Ofcom has closed its investigation of scoreland.com after the website introduced age/ID verification. The website now requires that UK users subscribe using a credit card (no debit cards) before content can be viewed. Visitors from other countries can see teaser images and can pay via several other options.

Ofcom writes:

In response to our investigation, Score Internet Group LLC have taken steps to implement highly effective age assurance to ensure compliance with their duties under Part 5 of the OSA.

As such, Ofcom is satisfied that the conduct that led to the opening of the investigation has ceased and we do not consider it appropriate to continue our investigation. We have therefore closed it without making any findings as to Score Internet's compliance with its duties, either currently or prior to its confirmation that it had taken steps to comply with the OSA.

Ofcom will be relieved that the world's most famous porn tube site will be brining its websites to the age/ID verification fold.

For those stupid enough to hand over ID that can used to maintain a log of their porn viewing, the age/ID verification will start by 24th July 2025. Surely it will be safer to continue porn viewing by using a VPN.

Ofcom has announced that several major providers have agrees to bring in robust methods to check users' age/ID for the first time. Ofcom Writes:

By 25 July, all sites and apps that allow pornography --  whether they are dedicated adult sites or social media, search or gaming services -- must use highly effective age checks to ensure children are not normally able to encounter it. Online firms who publish their own pornography are already required to protect children from it, and thousands of sites have already introduced robust age checks in response.

Major porn providers operating in the UK have confirmed to Ofcom that they will introduce effective checks by next month's deadline in order to comply with the new rules. They include PornHub, the most-visited pornographic service in the UK. Other services who are happy to be named at this stage include BoyfriendTV, Cam4, FrolicMe, inxxx, Jerkmate, LiveHDCams, MyDirtyHobby, RedTube, Streamate, Stripchat, Tube8, and YouPorn. This represents a broad range of pornography services accessed in the UK.

Monitoring compliance with these new duties is a priority for Ofcom. If any company fails to comply with its new duties, Ofcom can impose fines and -- in very serious cases --  apply for a court order to prevent the site or app from being available in the UK. As part of our work enforcing the Online Safety Act, we have already launched investigations into four porn providers and won't hesitate to take further action from July. Under 18s exposed to adult content

Robust age checks are a cornerstone of the Online Safety Act and will help protect children from harmful content. Under the Act, age assurance methods -- which include age verification, age estimation or a combination of both -- must be highly effective at correctly determining whether a user is under 18. Highly effective age checks include credit card checks, open banking or facial age estimation.

From 25 July, all social media, search and gaming sites and apps must prevent children in the UK from encountering harmful content including suicide, self-harm and eating-disorder content. Tech firms will have to apply the safety measures set out in our Children's Codes, or take alternative action to meet their duties, to mitigate the risks that their services pose to children.

The riskiest services will have to use highly effective age assurance to identify which users are children. Any provider that operates a recommender system and poses a medium or high risk of harmful content must configure their algorithms to filter out harmful content from children's feeds.

The services named today have indicated that they plan to deploy a type of age assurance solution which Ofcom said could be capable of being highly effective in our guidance. As we noted in our guidance, the way in which these solutions are implemented in practice will be the ultimate test of whether it is compliant with the OSA

Ofcom hasn't said much about other major porn tube sites that are not mentioned in the list. In fact most of the tube sites listed are owned by Aylo.

First Time Video is pay site specialising in first time in porn sets. there are two websites, ftvgirls.com and ftvmilfs.com.

First time video repsonded to the ofcom censorship by taking away an introductory page describing the website content. British users are now met with just a subscription option to join the website as a paying member.

See article from ofcom.org.uk

In June 2025 Ofcom announced an investigation of the website saying:

We have launched an investigation into whether First Time Videos LLC, which provides the pornographic services FTVGirls.com and FTVMilfs.com, has highly effective age assurance in place to protect children from pornography.

We will now gather and analyse evidence to determine whether any contraventions have occurred. If our assessment indicates compliance failures, we will issue provisional notices of contravention to providers, who can then make representations on our findings, before we make our final decisions.

We will provide updates on these investigations as soon as possible.

See article from en.wikipedia.org

4chan is an anonymous English-language imageboard website. The site hosts boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics, from video games and television to literature, cooking, weapons, music, history, technology, anime, physical fitness, politics, and sports, porn, among others. Registration is not available, except for staff, and users typically post anonymously. 4chan receives more than 22 million unique monthly visitors, of whom approximately half are from the United States.

The website achieved a little notoriety in Donald Trump's first presidential term. The wesbite was identified for providing a voice to 'alt-right' (right leaning) Trump supporters who were otherwise silenced by an alliance of liberal internet companies and mainstream media outlets..

In June 2025 Ofcom announced that it was looking into censoring 4chn. Ofcom wrote:

Ofcom has launched investigations into whether seven file-sharing services, 4chan and porn provider First Time Videos have failed to comply with their duties under the UK's Online Safety Act. Duties under the Act

The Online Safety Act has introduced new rules to ensure online services take action to protect their UK users, especially children.

Sites that publish their own pornography must already have highly effective age checks in place to stop children accessing this material. Search and user-to-user services -- where people can see content shared by others, including social media -- should have assessed the risk of their UK users encountering illegal content and activity on their platforms, and must now be taking appropriate steps to protect them from it.

As well as engaging with large platforms about their new duties, our dedicated taskforce has been attempting to engage with a number of smaller sites that may present particular risks to users. Today we have opened investigations into a number of these services.

Specifically, we are investigating whether the providers of these services have failed to:

put appropriate safety measures in place to protect UK users from illegal content and activity; complete -- and keep a record of -- a suitable and sufficient illegal harms risk assessment; and respond to a statutory information request.

4chan hasn't made a statement about Ofcom's censorship. The website is still generally available in the UKbut is partially self censored. Attempting to reach the site via the home page results in a 403 error message (meaning that the user is unauthorised). However jumping into any other page (eg https://boards.4chan.org/news/) works without error.

 

Offsite Comment: Allowing British authorities to demand compliance from virtually any website.

See article from reclaimthenet.org

Ofcom has set its sights on 4chan, a US-hosted imageboard owned by a Japanese national. The site operates under US law and has no physical infrastructure, employees, or legal registration in Britain. Nonetheless, UK regulators have declared it fair game.

Wherever in the world a service is based if it has 'links to the UK', it now has duties to protect UK users, Ofcom insists.

That phrase, links to the UK, is intentionally vague and extraordinarily expensive, allowing British authorities to demand compliance from virtually any website.

This kind of extraterritorial overreach marks a direct threat to the principle of national sovereignty in internet governance. The UK is attempting to dictate the rules of online speech to foreign companies, hosted on foreign servers, and serving users in other countries, all because someone in Britain might visit their site.

According to Ofcom, 4chan failed to respond to its statutory information requests, making it one of nine services now under formal investigation.

What this law actually does is push platforms, especially smaller or independent ones, out of the UK entirely.

Rather than making the internet safer, the law is creating a digital iron curtain around the UK, where only government-approved content and services remain accessible.