UPDATE: Jun. 6, 2025, 12:05 p.m. EDT This story has been updated with comments from Proton VPN.
A popular VPN service reported a 1,000 percent increase in registrations just 30 minutes after Pornhub blocked access in France this week. The adult site reportedly exited its second-biggest market because of a new French age-verification law that has a June 7 compliance deadline, per Mashable's Anna Iovine.
"5PM - PornHub blocks France from accessing its website," Proton VPN tweeted Wednesday. "5.30PM - @ProtonVPN registrations increase by 1,000%[.] For context, this is more than when TikTok blocked Americans."
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Proton VPN previously documented a 490 percent increase in daily signups in mid-January when TikTok briefly went offline ahead of a possible ban in the U.S.
A Proton spokesperson tells Mashable that when it built its VPN "to help people in authoritarian countries with online censorship, an access gateway for porn was obviously not what we had in mind." Still, they add, "VPN can be used in this way and signups from France have temporarily increased by a factor of 10."
A VPN, or virtual private network, is a service that routes your internet traffic through an encrypted tunnel to a remote server before sending it out onto the web. The main purpose of a VPN is to reclaim some online privacy from your ISP and other prying eyes. But they're also commonly used to spoof one's location: A VPN can make it appear as though its user is visiting websites from a country they're not physically in.
Age-verification laws for adult content have been enacted abroad and in nearly 20 U.S. states. They typically require sites to verify their users' ages via facial recognition or government ID. Such laws are intended to restrict children's access to adult content (and in some cases social media), but experts have flagged free speech and privacy concerns. What's more, technology like VPNs makes enforcement difficult.
For its part, Proton shares these concerns. "There's no such thing as age verification for children only, it's age verification for everyone, and having offshore porn sites or any other third parties collect IDs from adults and becoming a repository of potential blackmail material comes with its own risks," said the company's spokesperson. "A more technically sound approach would be content controls directly implemented on the devices parents chose to give their children."
Founded in 2014, the Swiss-based Proton offers a suite of privacy-centric web services, including email and cloud storage. Its VPN service was launched in 2017 and currently maintains a massive network of more than 13,000 servers in 117 countries worldwide. To date, it's the only VPN we've tested that's won a Mashable Choice Award. Read our full Proton VPN review for more information.
