I was wondering their reasoning, here:
We have publicly supported mandatory age verification of viewers of adult content for years, but any method of age verification must preserve user privacy and safety.
Basically, they don't disagree with mandatory verification, they just wish for it to do so in a way that doesn't violate the privacy of adults legitimately accessing the content.
Their suggestion for this is:
The only solution that makes the internet safer, preserves user privacy, and stands to prevent children from accessing age inappropriate content is performing age verification at the device level.
Essentially, do age verification on-device, and have the device send the okay to view signal to the site. This is something websites cannot implement on their own, until device/os developers implement such. I agree this is a good solution, but I think it'll be difficult to push tech companies to do this without further legislation.
I think it might be good to seek the EU to require tech companies to implement such a on-device feature, which will naturally roll out to all tech devices.
Edit: these quotes are from the porn company, not the court.
Personally I believe that there should be at least some attempt to protect kids from seeing adult content online. Ideally of course it'd be parental responsibility, but having some sort of system in place would be good. I think the tech around porn as it currently exists is deeply harmful, both for children and for women. I'm not against porn as a thing, but like.... come on, we can't just be spreading around videos without any sort of filters and removing it from the control of the people featured in the video.
There's not a good technical solution for these problems just yet it seems. I think the idea of age verification on-device, and then sending an 18+ or minor flag to apps/sites/etc. would be a good solution. We already click on a "I'm 18+" button, and this is functionally the equivalent but having age verification going on completely offline. Yes, people could bypass that with technical knowhow, but the point isn't to stop adults, it's to largely prevent kids from seeing this stuff.