Pornhub, Youporn and Redtube are now banned to French users The parent company suspends its sites in France to protest against the new law on age verification

As of today, all visitors from France trying to access adult sites Pornhub, Youporn, and Redtube will receive the same message when attempting to connect: an error message denouncing the country’s age verification requirements and denying access to the content. In response to a French law requiring pornographic websites to implement stricter age verification measures, Aylo, the Cyprus-based parent company of the three sites, has decided to suspend them within French territory. "Aylo is very pro-age verification", said Solomon Friedman, vice president of the investment fund Ethical Capital Partners, which owns Aylo. However, he considers the French legislation to be "symbolic, unnecessary, and dangerous for privacy", "which their government refuses to tell them". By displaying the message instead of Pornhub’s vast adult content library, Aylo "is communicating directly with the French people to tell them how dangerous, potentially harmful, and ineffective the French law is", he continued.

But France is not the only territory affected by this new legislation: 17 major porn platforms operating across Europe have until June 6 to implement techniques aimed at verifying the age of their French users. Their non-European counterparts have been subject to this rule since April 11. According to the Financial Times, the European Commission has also announced that it will provide its own age verification app in July 2025, a project launched after investigating four adult sites — Pornhub, Stripchat, XNXX, and XVideos — all criticized for lacking age verification measures.