French telecoms giant Free has been accused of undermining child protection efforts in the country by French Socialist MP Thierry Sother.
Her comments came after the French company rolled out a free VPN service for its mobile subscribers.
Launched on September 16, Free’s new “mVPN” allows users to hide their IP address and place their location as if abroad.
With a simple toggle in the Free app, subscribers can route their internet traffic as if they were in another country, sidestepping State-imposed restrictions of online content.
The service, which lasts 12 hours per activation, is available to all 4G and 5G customers at no extra cost.
Critics say the tool opens the door for minors to evade France’s new age-verification laws targeting pornography.
The VPN includes servers located outside of France and by routing traffic abroad, Free mVPN sidesteps the blocks imposed in France on pornographic websites.
The move has not gone unnoticed by lawmakers: “The VPN offered by Free allows minors to circumvent online age restrictions,” Sother said in a letter to French digital regulator Acorm yesterday.
“This poses a danger to their safety and health, while the TikTok inquiry commission has already shown the urgent need to better protect them,” he wrote.
The MP warned that the company’s large-scale rollout of the tool “raises serious concerns regarding the protection of minors online and directly undermines compliance with legal obligations imposed on companies for this very purpose”.
Under the Law to Secure the Digital Space (SREN), passed in May, pornographic websites accessible in France are required to implement strict age checks from early 2026.
Enforcement will be overseen by Arcom, the State’s digital regulator.
Free’s service effectively hands subscribers of all ages the means to route around the system.
UK-based adult content site Pornhub’s parent company, Canada’s Aylo, has already pulled its website from the French market in protest of the restrictions. Following that decision, France saw a surge in VPN demand.
Sother now warns that Free’s decision risks “jeopardising” the State’s wider agenda of online controls.
Beyond the regulations already in place, such an initiative “also pre-empts and jeopardises the French legislator’s ability to introduce further restrictions or prohibitions on access to certain websites from within France”, the MP wrote.
He also noted that France’s Digital Affairs Minister Clara Chappaz, has floated banning social media access for children under 15.
“Free’s new service would, in effect, render such a decision unenforceable,” Sother said.
Not all reactions have been negative, though and some users welcomed the move as a win for online privacy.
“This is a major step for privacy and an additional tool for French people to defend themselves against the new censorship measures put in place by France and the EU,” one Free subscriber wrote.
Concern about online age verification has been growing in Europe.
In early August, a coalition of European citizens launched a campaign aimed at repealing what they describe as the European Union’s “intrusive” and “dangerous” online age verification measures.
