The new owner of Pornhub in a recent statement said that the government should take pride in sexual expression instead of cracking down on porn websites. It further urged the governments to help make porn “normal and boring”, the AFP reported.
Ethical Capital Partners (ECP), a Canadian private equity firm, bought MindGeek, the parent company of Pornhub, three months ago, bringing with it a stable of additional websites including YouPorn.
The acquisition has also resulted in a slew of legal issues. Its websites were removed from the US state of Utah in May after being ordered to verify user ages.
For months, website owners and regulators in France have been negotiating how to put a 2020 age verification law into action. Two of MindGeek’s sites have not implemented age verification and face a court ruling on July 7 that could result in their closure.
“We do not want any underage users on our websites,” ECP founder Solomon Friedman told AFP in an interview. However, he rejected the notion that the onus should be placed on websites, instead urging operating systems to come up with a solution.
“We strongly support age verification solutions that do two things: effectively protect children and do not expose personal data, “Friedman said. “The only solution that achieves both of these goals is device or browser-based verification,” Friedman explained, adding that it would be a “very simple step for Google and Apple.”
Notably, in the year 2020, the New York Times published an article levelling allegations that MindGeek’s sites were hosting material depicting rapes and sex involving minors.
The NYT‘s 2020 article read, “Its site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for “girls under18” (no space) or “14yo” leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.”
The article sparked intense scrutiny from regulators in several countries, and Visa and MasterCard suspended payment processing.
The owners tried for two years to sell the company, which is primarily based in Canada but has a complex corporate structure that spans many of the world’s tax havens, with its official headquarters in Luxembourg. Jean-Noel Barrot, the digital minister, has called children accessing porn websites a “scandal” and has directly challenged ECP to explain how they will comply with the law.
Solomon stated that he had contacted Barrot’s office and promised to deliver a report soon, stating that his company was committed to “talking openly and proudly about the porn industry.” “I think society has moved in the direction where we are proud of sexual expression. The fact that it’s adult is going to be boring, just as (legalised) cannabis in Canada has become boring.”
