For three months now, Britain’s porn-users have been asked to do something radical: prove they are adults. Despite the predictable outcry about “nanny statism” and “creeping censorship”, the much-loathed Online Safety Act is doing what few laws ever achieve — it’s actually working.

Pornhub says its UK traffic has plunged by 77% since July. The BBC reports that Google searches for the site have almost halved and Ofcom finds that visits to porn sites overall are down by nearly a third. The new law has at last forced the tech industry to shoulder a sliver of responsibility for the harms it profits from.

Ofcom says the law prevents children from “easily stumbling across porn without searching for it”, marking, in its words, “the end of an age-blind internet”. That’s no small victory. As the Children’s Commissioner points out, most children don’t go looking for pornography — it finds them. Nearly six in 10 say their first exposure was accidental, and the platform most likely to serve it to them isn’t Pornhub at all, but X. VPN use briefly spiked as users tried to dodge the checks but quickly fell back, and even Pornhub’s parent company, the Canadian firm Aylo, concedes there’s been no surge in hidden viewers.

Yet the Online Safety Act was fiercely contested. When age verification came into force, Nigel Farage and Owen Jones briefly found themselves on the same side of history, united in calling for it to be scrapped. But it was the delicate sensibilities of the libertarian Right across the pond that were most offended. Elon Musk, whose platform X allows children to sign up from the age of 13, called age verification “a Trojan horse for state censorship”.

The idea that the world’s most powerful tech oligarchs — from the owners of pornography empires to social media giants that quietly host it — are noble defenders of free speech is absurd. Whether it’s an Isis beheading video, animal torture or extreme pornography, there is — or ought to be — a balance between the freedom to watch and the freedom from such material. Online platforms are not public squares but private fiefdoms, answerable only to shareholders. That such abject nonsense has been repeated by prominent British politicians on the Right shows how thoroughly the gospel of the US tech barons has colonized our politics.

There is, in fact, a conservative tradition of drawing moral boundaries. As Miriam Cates, former MP and GB News presenter, told me: “Conservatives have always known that pornography is a corrupting influence on society, which is why in Britain — until the very recent invention of the internet — we have always prohibited the distribution of extreme sexual material.”

She went on: “Those who claim that the ability to create, watch and share pornography is a foundation of Western freedoms don’t know their history. Online pornography is the opposite of freedom, enslaving men, degrading women and destroying children for the commercial gain of a few tech-bro billionaires who should be behind bars.”

Cates is right. There is nothing remotely “free” about an industry that monetizes addiction, exploitation and human misery. The new rules simply restore a basic moral boundary: just as publicans ought not to give alcohol to children, providers of online content have a duty to ask for proof of age before serving up pornography.

The moral panic isn’t on the side of those who support age verification, but among those terrified of any limit at all. The adults are finally back in charge — and if that makes the libertarian Right uncomfortable, it tells us all we need to know about who their “freedom” really serves.

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Josephine Bartosch is assistant editor at The Critic and co-author of Pornocracy.

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