In April, the UK passed the Digital Economy Act 2017, legislation that mandated that any website showing adult content must verify the ages of its visitors. It was pushed through in response to concerns that children were being corrupted by easy access to and exposure to adult content at an early age. Section 15(1) of the bill requires that "pornographic material" not be published online, on a "commercial basis," unless it is "not normally accessible by those under 18." The bill has several flaws, not least the number of vague proposals it contains, and the ad hoc definition of what pornography actually is.

Section 17 of the same act outlined the creation of an "age-verification regulator," the digital equivalent of a bouncer standing between you and your porn. This gatekeeper will have the right, and duty, to demand you show proof of age, or else refuse you access. In addition, the body will be able to impose fines and enforcement notices on those who either neglect or circumvent the policy.

Myles Jackman on the Digital Economy Act a year before it was passed.

The punishments it will have in its arsenal will not be trivial, either, and include being able to serve injunctions or otherwise force compliance. In addition, the financial penalties are capped at a maximum of either 5 percent of the company's annual turnover or £250,000 ($329,000). Falling foul of the rules could be ruinous for a number of small businesses that fail to comply for any number of reasons.

Businesses that do comply may also potentially lose a significant amount of money by implementing age verification. It's currently assumed that the burden will be passed on to the sites themselves, which, again, could threaten many sites. It's believed that one such verification system will charge around $0.07 per verification, which could substantially eat into the already slender revenues for some websites.

"Mindgeek has had several conversations with officials and is currently working on its own age verification platform, called AgeID."

There are plenty of ifs and buts, because very few of the key decisions surrounding the program have been made. The government has yet to nominate a regulator to enforce the bill's provisions, although it's presumed that the British Board of Film Classification will be given the task. The BBFC is, however, an industry body set up by the film industry in 1913 to avoid direct government regulation and censorship.

The Open Rights Group believes that the BBFC will then hand over the actual mechanisms of the age verification platform to a third party in the private sector. Mindgeek has had several conversations with officials and is currently pushing its own age verification platform, AgeID. If selected, this platform could become the principal wall between Britons and their pornography -- giving Mindgeek enormous power in the market. The service is already available in Germany, which restricts a wide variety of online services to those over 18, including violent video games, films with an 18 certificate and adult content.

"Obscenity lawyer" Myles Jackman wrote in his blog that he believes the government has ceded its responsibility to regulate the law it is enacting. Instead, it is handing "regulatory liability to a non-Governmental body founded by the film industry (the BBFC)." He added that passing the age verification role to a private sector company is similarly unwise.

Mindgeek's discussions with the UK government are a matter of public record, as are some of the documents relating to the discussions. In one email, an unnamed Mindgeek representative proposed the gray-listing -- essentially a temporary block -- of more than four million URLs that (British ISP) Sky has cataloged. Each one of these sites, including Twitter, would then be contacted and told to sign up to the age verification system -- like Mindgeek's nascent AgeID -- or face blacklisting. A Mindgeek spokesperson confirmed to Engadget that it believes up to 25 million Britons could sign up to its system.

Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group is critical of the plans, saying that the "approach is almost certain to go wrong." By leaving the choice of age verification platform up to the websites, it hands Mindgeek all of the power. Similarly, he feels that, whatever happens, the result will be "the censorship of legal material." And that the tools offered to the regulator are "purely a policy and financial choice," rather than limited by more specific factors.

The idea is that a user will sign up to AgeID once and then have what Pornhub VP Corey Price describes as a "seamless browsing experience." The executive believes that the approach will ensure users can move between compliant sites without "hitting multiple age verification walls."

Pornographer Pandora/Blake, who has criticized the age verification platform, explained that the government has "written Mindgeek a blank check." "Smaller sites like mine," they argued, "will effectively have to pay a 'Mindgeek tax' to our biggest competitor."

Adam Grayson, CFO of Evil Angel, can, at least, see the business sense of what Mindgeek is doing, even if it's not great for the wider industry: "Mindgeek, very astutely, is trying to position themselves as a central place, the logic being that everyone goes to Pornhub at some point." He added that if he were Mindgeek, he'd "probably take a similar approach. 'I'm already the biggest porn brand in the world, I have the most traffic, I should just consolidate my power.'"

Pornhub VP Corey Price refutes the company's implied role as a bully of the adult content industry and denies that AgeID is a tax on users or third parties. "We do not believe that age verification costs should be passed on to customers," he said, adding that it'll be "completely free to all users." As for the smaller sites, like Pandora/Blake's, Price said that Mindgeek will license AgeID "in a fair, cost-effective manner, based on the size of their UK traffic." The executive believes that his company's age verification platform will make life easy for "advertisers, affiliates and [our] competitors."

Whatever happens, it doesn't appear that there's been any scrutiny about whether Mindgeek is a fit and proper body for this responsibility. In 2014, the company was described by David Auerbach in Slate as "a porn provider. Or more accurately, the porn provider." It is not simply one of several competing adult content outlets selling their wares online, but a behemoth that has been described by many as a monopoly. Mindgeek could well command the attention of around 100 million users.

It's also been postulated that the company could be the world's third-biggest user of internet bandwidth, although, again, these figures are nearly impossible to verify. Pornhub is the world's most trafficked porn website, with an Alexa Ranking of 39. Numbers 1 through 38 are either Google's various local domains, or the online utilities that we all take for granted, like Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit, Taobao, Amazon, Twitter and Weibo. Between the various other outlets that Mindgeek hosts and owns, it's extraordinarily likely that if you've wanted to get your rocks off, you've done it on a Mindgeek site.

Fabian Thylmann addresses the Oxford Union on the matter of sex work in 2015.

Mindgeek itself was founded by Fabian Thylmann, a German entrepreneur who built an empire out of free porn. After creating online tracking software used by the adult industry, Thylmann cashed out to buy his first porn website. Colin Rowntree, founder of Wasteland, one of the oldest BDSM websites still running on the internet today, said that "2007 was the perfect storm, between the banking and mortgage crises in the US, and then the launch of the tube sites." That was when Thylmann, backed by a hefty Wall Street loan, went on a spending spree to acquire a raft of sites including Mansef, Interhub, MyDirtyHobby, Webcams.com and xTube. But in 2012, Thylmann was extradited to Germany on charges of tax evasion, forcing him to sell the company.

"Tube" sites like Pornhub and xTube are known as such because their business model mirrors that of YouTube. Users are encouraged to upload clips of their own creation for sharing and viewing, with few barriers to sharing copyrighted content. "There was a suspicion," said Rowntree, that users who were uploading other producers' videos to sites like Pornhub "were outsourced employees of the tubes." He explained that the people were believed to be "buying memberships to pay sites, downloading [everything] as fast as they can and uploading it to build the libraries."

And as those libraries grew, so did Mindgeek's prominence, which enabled it to use its financial clout to buy other sites. The limits of this business were tested when producer Ventura Content filed a $6.75 million lawsuit, claiming that "tube sites maintain the fiction that they offer a forum for consumers to upload and share their own original user-generated adult video" but that in reality they were just "repositories for an extensive collection of infringing adult videos," no better than Napster or Kazaa.