A decree published this Friday, October 8 in the official journal aims to force pornographic sites to control the age of their user in France. Is it only technically feasible?

The question of controlling the age of Internet users who consult pornographic sites comes up more and more regularly in the news in France. Already, in June 2020, an amendment included in the bill on domestic violence aimed to oblige adult sites as well as Internet service providers (ISPs) to check the age of users. The objective being clear: to prevent minors from venturing there.

This October 8, a decree published in the official journal officially opens the way to an attempt to block pornographic sites by the French State. If you haven't been following anything, here's the whole story.

Why a blockage?

First of all, it should be remembered why the question of blocking arises again, in this month of October 2021.

Recently, several articles echoed a lawsuit brought by two child protection associations. The latter have attacked major porn sites, accusing them of failing to verify the age of visitors, with the ultimate goal of blocking them. According to journalist Marc Rees of Next Inpact, who obtained the judgment, their request was rejected.

On the other hand, this will not prevent the question of blocking from arising in the months to come. Because a few hours before this judgment was rendered, the government published a decree in the official journal and this could concretely cause the blocking, at least temporarily, of certain sites.

Clearly, this decision gives the power to the Higher Audiovisual Council (CSA) to send a formal notice to adult sites, asking them to comply with French law, and therefore to verify that Internet users have over 18 years old. In theory, the sites will have 15 days to obey, at the risk of being punished by three years' imprisonment and a fine of 75,000 euros, for having violated article 227-24 of the Penal Code, relating to the offenses committed against minors.

How does the CSA intend to block pornographic sites?

To block pornographic sites, the CSA would have the possibility of seizing the president of the court of law of Paris, so that it makes inaccessible the sites. That's all well and good, but concretely, how do they want to go about it? The decree authorizes blocking “by any appropriate means, in particular by using the domain name blocking protocol (DNS). »

As we mentioned in our article devoted to the Facebook outage, the DNS is the system that allows you to "translate" a URL (eg: www.frandroid.com) into an IP address (a series of numbers) so that your browser knows to which site it should give you access to.

To go furtherApple and child pornography: more questions than solutions

The decree therefore proposes that justice imposes on Internet service providers (ISPs) to modify this DNS, making it impossible to find blocked sites. Moreover, rather than a blank page, Internet users will be “directed to an information page from the Superior Audiovisual Council indicating the reasons for the blocking measure. »

Is it really technically feasible?

Technically, internet service providers (ISPs) can certainly redirect adult sites to a CSA page. But is it a good idea? Not really.

As Alexandre Archambault, a lawyer specializing in cybersecurity, points out on Twitter, "it's a bit like rerouting traffic from a large Parisian toll at the busy hour of electronic toll or CB queues on a small departmental road with 2 counters: guaranteed traffic jam, not only on the departmental road, but further upstream on the entire motorway”. In other words, the risk of network saturation is very great.

In particular, he explains that the traffic generated by porn sites is even greater than streaming giant sites like Netflix. What pose a big concern to the network infrastructure if you want to pass the flow through the wrong pipe in short.

The specialist advises directing Internet users to a “black hole”, that is to say an error page, which would solve the problem. But this is not the solution recommended by the decree.

Is it really possible to control age?

That's the big question. And in a way, we can say that the government leaves it up to adult sites to answer them.

Our British neighbors have already tried to implement a similar solution via a bill in April 2019. This ended up being buried in October 2019 in the face of the excessive technical difficulties posed.

Because in practice, verifying the age of an Internet user is a real headache. Should each Internet user be asked for their identity card? If so, it is hard to imagine a solution that would not go through state control, like France Connect, with all the ethical questions that this raises.

But even if the verification were possible, its circumvention would not be, in fact, so difficult. It would be enough for an Internet user to use any VPN to connect virtually from a country that does not verify the age of Internet users.

Another method: a simple change of DNS could make it possible to circumvent blocking by ISPs. In short, as is often the case when the French State tackles a problem on the Internet (cf. HADOPI), we often have a rather terrible feeling of disconnection.

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