Comment by tossandthrow
8 days ago
> One tweak to the rules and all of a sudden not only do porn sites have to verify the age of their UK visitors but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP.
The UK does not have jurisdictional power over anything outside their country - they can not a foreign site to do age verification of foreign residents.
Now, the UK can say that they need to check for all UK residents, regardless of them using VPNs. But if there are no practical way to do this, I think the UK will have diplomatic issues enforcing anything to non UK companies breaking that laws - as they would need, eg. Germany, to help them enforcing the law on certain providers.
Other counties and regions have or will have similar laws. I can definitely see the EU, UK and US collaborating on something like this.
However, if I was running a foreign site not subject to UK law or other privacy law, with UK visitors, and I was a ruthless businessperson, I'd definitely implement this verification thing in order to collect and store a photo of every visitor.
Not if it means that you don't get any visitors
If you wanted to do this for some reason you'd just do it across the board and say it was for age verification. The reason nobody does it is because people are (rightfully) not okay with this nonsense.