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December 2025: Suspension of payments for platforms without AVS

Aug 15, 2025 #Age Verification, #AVS, #Censorship, #JMStV, #Jugendmedienschutz-Staatsvertrag, #KJM, #Kommission für Jugendmedienschutz, #Marc Jan Eumann, #network blocks, #Paulita Pappel, #payment block

Deutschland sperrt Zahlungen an Porno-Seiten

Also available in: Deutsch (German)

On 1 December 2025, the agreed amendment to the German Interstate Treaty on the Protection of Minors in the Media (JMStV) will come into force. The package includes a legal instrument to prohibit credit institutions from processing payments to adult entertainment platforms without AVS. German media regulators apparently intend to make immediate use of this option. Marc Jan Eumann, Chairman of the Commission for the Protection of Minors in the Media (KJM), has already made a clear statement to the Evangelical Press Service (epd): ‘The new Youth Media Protection State Treaty gives us the instrument to suspend payment transactions by site visitors, for example via credit cards, via financial service providers.’ This initially refers to the Aylo platforms (YouPorn, PornHub), which are subject to blocking orders that are largely ineffective. Alternative DNS servers or VPNs are not even necessary to circumvent these orders, as traffic has simply been redirected to mirror domains (https://medien.epd.de/article/3424).

The KJM chairman couldn’t care less about data protection issues affecting consumers of adult content when it comes to facial scanning.

Eumann had already made a name for himself as a hardliner when it came to youth protection. At the re:publika media conference, Eumann told Paulita Pappel: ‘I couldn’t care less about such a data protection problem (with AVS, ed.) among my circle of acquaintances.’ The background to this was a discussion about the corresponding problem with the use of the required AVS, which relies on biometric facial scanning. Eumann had already been controversial before. For example, he was accused of cronyism during the election for chairman of the Rhineland-Palatinate Media Authority in 2018. (https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/der-fall-eumann-und-die-folgen-wir-machen-das-anders-100.html)

Tougher measures are also to be taken against the use of mirror domains. However, even then, no special technical expertise will be required to circumvent the blocks. Browsers such as Opera come with a built-in VPN that is even activated by default and uses a foreign IP number to render the providers’ enforced blocks ineffective.

Authoritarian regimes as role models?

The KJM has been working on the issue of age verification for over 20 years. So far, without any real success. Instead, it has been a game of cat and mouse, with large providers usually coming out on top. One often gets the impression that the KJM likes to put itself in the public eye to justify the enormous amount of public money it has been devouring for decades. Paulita Pappel goes on to say in a statement to netzpolitik.org: ‘Network blocking and the blocking of payment flows are instruments that we otherwise only know from authoritarian regimes.’ In fact, the entire approach of the ‘clean men’ is based on assumptions about the alleged harmfulness of pornography, which are not really scientifically proven.