UK revives plans to force age verification for adult content

London, Feb 8 (IANS) The UK government has once again introduced mandatory age verification to access adult content online.The nation has announced its plans to revive the scheme that has been deemed unworkable since 2015, reports Engadget.Chris Philp MP, Under Secretary of State for Tech and the Digital Economy, has announced that the mostly-unchanged plan will be introduced as part of the forthcoming Online Safety Bill.Mandatory age verification has been in the works ever since the Conservative party included it in its 2015 manifesto, the report said.Since then, it has attempted to get the scheme running, passing the enabling laws in 2017 and setting a series of deadlines to implement the system, it added.In April 2019, regulators said that the scheme would finally begin operating that July but the then Culture Secretary pulled the plug in mid-June.At the time, the plan was to replace the plan with a broader set of rules then being examined under the umbrella of Online Harms.Unfortunately, the bill remains full of the same problems that rendered the system unworkable when it was previously introduced, as per the report.
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