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UNITED KINGDOM, November 14, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – The ubiquity of pornography on the internet is an ongoing concern for governments and communities around the world, and the United Kingdom is currently considering addressing it with one of the most expansive measures yet.

Margot James MP, Minister of the UK’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS), says that by next Easter the government will require commercial porn sites to verify that users are at least 18 years old, the Independent reports, as part of the Digital Economy Act of 2017.

The British Board of Film Classification, which handles age ratings for movies, will be responsible for monitoring websites’ compliance. Violators could be blocked by UK internet service providers (ISPs).

The biggest remaining hurdle is how to develop a viable age verification system.

“It has taken longer than I would have liked,” James said, “but I’d balance that with a confidence that we’ve got it right.”

She said officials are currently developing a plan to give every teenager an online ID – a “digital identity” or “online passport” – that would contain their age, the Telegraph reports.

“At the moment we think we have a robust means of verifying people’s ages at the age of 18. The challenge is to be able to develop tools that verify people’s age at a younger age, like for example 13,” James explained. “Those techniques are not robust enough yet but there is a lot of technological research going on and I’m reasonably confident that over the next few years there will be robust means of identifying age at younger than 18.”

One acknowledged drawback of the system is that it wouldn’t necessarily catch sexually-explicit content on smaller websites or shared via social media.

Porn has been linked to a litany of societal ills, and has foes among religious conservatives, secular liberals, and former addicts alike.

“I’m very, very concerned about online content being a driver for [suicide] particularly when you look at extent of use and how that feeds into people’s body image,” said Suicide Prevention Minister Jackie Doyle-Price. “And we know that self-harm and suicide are on the rise. Social media companies have been very slow.”

Even so, some argue that government-issued digital passports aren’t the most effective remedy, and that they could develop into a means of blocking access to other types of content.

“If the new technologies being developed to implement the block work well, there’s a chance they could spread rapidly around the globe as governments seek to put controls on otherwise unregulated online space,” Billy Perrigo writes at TIME Magazine. “When that happens, porn might not be the only thing getting blocked.”

Perrigo quotes the Open Rights Group (ORG), a London-based nonprofit that bills itself as protecting “your rights in the digital age,” as fearing the system “could be used to block other types of legal content – for example websites relating to suicide, anorexia or extreme political views.”

While various porn apologists have cried “censorship” over the years in response to modest efforts to crack down on the material, there is cause for concern about the UK’s commitment to free speech. Police in London and South Yorkshire have encouraged residents to report “hateful” speech that merely “feel[s] like crimes,” while House of Commons speaker John Bercow declared in July that “respect” for LGBT “rights” “has to trump” “somebody’s adherence to faith.”

Whatever government’s proper role in addressing the porn problem may be, pro-family advocates have called on families to exercise vigilance over their children’s education, entertainment viewing, and internet access. There are also a wealth of resources dedicated to helping people resist the temptation and overcome porn addiction.