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Porn portal xHamster
Photo: Annette Riedl / dpa
The high-reach porn portal xHamster is threatened with a network block due to disregard of the protection of children and young people.
"At xHamster we have a definitive decision against which no legal remedies are possible," said Tobias Schmid, the director of the state media agency in North Rhine-Westphalia, of the dpa news agency.
Operators of other porn sites are currently suing the corresponding notices before the Higher Administrative Court for North Rhine-Westphalia.
According to Schmid, the state media authority considers the legal situation to be "fairly clear": "It's pornography, there is no age verification and German law is applicable," said Schmid.
xHamster has so far refused any communication with the supervisory authority and has not implemented any of the measures to make its offer legal.
Therefore one has now approached the network operator.
These include Vodafone and Telekom: “We have informed you of the fact that there is illegal content in your networks that must be blocked and we are currently listening to it.
Then we decide. "
A spokesman for Telekom said on request that access barriers would only be implemented technically if they were legally ordered.
At Vodafone it was said that they were currently working on the legal assessment.
In the answer to the state media authority, the decisions of the Düsseldorf Administrative Court of December 1 will be taken into account.
The court had found the state institution to be right.
"Got exactly zero answers"
xHamster is one of the largest websites in the world.
It also contains a lot of semi-legal content, such as secretly recorded videos showing women who were obviously filmed and photographed against their will.
For a long time it was also unclear who was hiding behind the portal.
In October, DER SPIEGEL revealed the people behind it.
On request, xHamster announced on the subject of network blocking that these were "far from an optimal solution".
Through them, young people would only switch to smaller sites where they would be exposed to more extreme content.
The company is ready to work with the German authorities.
Currently, age checks are the only way to keep young people away from adult content.
Such a technology can be used.
But this must be done across the industry.
Schmid, on the other hand, cannot see the willingness to work with xHamster.
"I hardly know anyone to whom we have sent more letters and e-mails than xHamster and we got exactly zero replies," he said.
However, the portal is free at any time to comply with the law and thus to end the proceedings against itself.
Web blocking has been highly controversial in Germany for 20 years.
The Commission for the Protection of Minors in the Media had decided to block several porn portals in June 2020, and in September 2020 the lawsuits against the measure became known.
The administrative judges needed more than a year just to deal with the complaints in the express proceedings.
The main proceedings continue, but have no suspensive effect.
In the matter, however, the judges make it clear that the porn portals must bow to German law, even if they are based abroad (read more about this here).
A long process had preceded it.
On behalf of the Commission for the Protection of Minors in the Media, the State Agency first wrote to the operators themselves, then informed the authorities at the company's official headquarters in Cyprus.
At the same time, the authorities tried to locate the servers from which the porn offers are being delivered, in order to possibly enforce a ban there.
As a last resort to enforce the State Treaty on the Protection of Young People from the Media, blocking is provided by domestic access providers.
ulz / dpa