On October 9, 2026, the Higher Administrative Court of North Rhine-Westphalia (OVG NRW) in Münster ruled in two expedited proceedings that the state media regulator, the Landesanstalt für Medien NRW (LfM), probably cannot order German internet providers to block Pornhub and YouPorn. The court upheld two lower-court emergency decisions, according to dpa-AFX, and found the blocking orders "likely" violate EU law. For now, both Aylo-owned sites remain reachable from Germany.

Why It Matters

This is the second European decision in as many days built on the same legal reasoning. Yesterday we covered Luxembourg's ALIA (see *Cam Shy on Compliance*), which used the country-of-origin principle *against* a platform: LiveJasmin's home regulator said Luxembourg's age-verification standard follows the site into every EU country. Münster applies the same principle in the other direction. A *destination* state cannot step in, even when it agrees the site is breaking its law. Together the two decisions clarify how age verification is enforced in Europe. Enforcement runs through the home regulator (Cyprus, Luxembourg, Ireland, the Czech Republic) or through Brussels for VLOPs, and not through 27 national regulators ordering ISP blocks. For adult platforms, that makes enforcement less fragmented, but the risk doesn't go away. The pressure now sits with the Commission's pending DSA decisions, where fines can reach 6% of global turnover. It also explains why France, Italy and now Germany have struggled to act unilaterally. For age-verification vendors, the buyers that matter are EU-wide compliance teams, not country-by-country ones. Germany's national regulators may now push harder for EU-level action rather than give up.

The court did not let the sites off. It agreed with the regulator that Pornhub and YouPorn breach Germany's youth media protection treaty (the JMStV), because a one-click "I am 18" confirmation is not effective age verification. Its problem was jurisdiction. Under the EU country-of-origin principle, online services generally only have to follow the rules of the member state where they are established. Since February 2024, the Digital Services Act has regulated protection of minors online uniformly across the EU. The operator is based in Cyprus, so the court said supervision belongs to Cypriot authorities for YouPorn and to the European Commission for Pornhub, which is designated a Very Large Online Platform. The court added a pointed caveat in its press statement: this "does not mean that online platforms from other EU countries may offer pornography to minors in Germany." It means Düsseldorf is the wrong regulator to act on it.

This ends, at least for now, one of Europe's longest-running adult-site enforcement fights. The LfM had pursued Aylo's sites for years. After it moved from targeting the sites to ordering ISPs to block them, the Administrative Court of Düsseldorf halted the network-ban orders in November 2025 pending the appeals that Münster has now decided. XBIZ names Telekom and Vodafone as the providers that received the blocking orders. The Commission opened DSA proceedings against Pornhub's operator and other large adult platforms in May 2025, and in March 2026 it preliminarily found Pornhub, Stripchat, XNXX and XVideos in breach of the DSA's minor-protection duties. Those cases are still open.

Sources

Update — 2026-10-10

Initial entry — story first created.