An address that opened last week and today returns an error. A page that loads at home and doesn't load on a mobile phone. A classifieds site that, without warning, stops appearing. The question that follows is almost always the same, and it has two halves: is this legal, and is the problem mine or the site's? They're worth separating, because they're different things — one is a matter of law, the other of networks, and one almost never explains the other.

Prostitution and pimping: the distinction that underpins everything

In Portugal, the Penal Code does not punish those who engage in prostitution. What it does punish is anyone who exploits another person's prostitution — that is what is called lenocínio, or pimping, and the article in question is Article 169. The distinction is between the person providing the service and the third party who promotes, encourages or facilitates someone else's prostitution.

Note what this distinction does not do: it does not produce lists of authorised sites or banned sites. The law speaks of people and conduct, not of addresses. That is why the answer to "why won't it open?" is almost never found in an article of a code — and it is why the two halves of the question are dealt with in different sections of this page.

This page describes what exists and what the sources it cites say. It is not legal advice: a specific case should be put to a lawyer.

The 2020 proposal is still a proposal

A drafted text from 2020 to regulate the activity circulates frequently, cited as though it were legislation in force. It is a proposal. To write that it is law would be a mistake, and anyone who comes across it presented as "the new law" is reading a draft bill dressed up as a statute. It is worth knowing what it contained, precisely because much of the confusion on the subject comes from this text:

  • it defined prostitution as the provision of sexual services with free and informed consent, previously agreed and refusable at any moment;
  • it set 21 as the minimum age for providing such services;
  • it provided for service contracts, a dedicated economic activity classification and a regime of contributions and social support;
  • it imposed medical examinations every six months, with clinical information kept confidential and only a certificate of fitness accessible to third parties;
  • it allowed for registered establishments, with no external signs of a sexual nature and subject to inspection;
  • and, in the article on advertising, it limited promotion to the providers' own pages, to designated classified sections in newspapers and to sites dedicated to classifieds, with the advertiser responsible for verifying the age and the lawful residence status of the person being promoted.

The most consequential article was another one: the one that rewrote Article 169 of the Penal Code, repealing its paragraph 1 and leaving punishable the conduct of anyone who promotes, encourages or facilitates another person's prostitution through violence or serious threat, by deception, by abuse of authority or by taking advantage of particular vulnerability. In other words: it narrowed the offence to cases of exploitation. For as long as the proposal remains a proposal, that is exactly what it is — a written intention, not an applicable rule.

Why a site decides by country

Anyone running a platform accessible from several countries doesn't have just one rule to comply with. The subject is handled differently from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and the debate itself splits into positions that cannot be reconciled: there are those who argue for abolition, those who argue for regulation and those who argue for decriminalisation. These are not variations in wording — they are distinct models, with distinct consequences for whoever publishes adverts.

Faced with that variety, the cheapest way out for an operator is to draw a line on the map and cut off an entire country, often as a precaution and without any concrete prohibition existing on the other side. Country-level blocking is, first and foremost, a risk-management decision taken by whoever publishes — and it is useful for the reader to know this, because it means that a site which does not open is telling them nothing whatsoever about the law where they happen to be.

How country-level blocking works on the inside

The mechanism — geo-blocking, in the jargon — rests almost entirely on the IP address. Every internet connection goes out through an address, and to that address corresponds an approximate location in commercial geolocation databases. When someone opens the site:

  • the server sees the address the request comes from;
  • it consults a geolocation database;
  • and it decides, with that information, whether to serve the page or return an error.

What this filter decides is whether the connection gets through, not what the page shows afterwards. Someone who gets through from Lisbon and someone who gets through from London see exactly the same list of escorts in Lisbon: the geography of the content is editorial and is written on the page; that of the block is network-level and is in the address. Confusing the two accounts for a good part of the misunderstandings on the subject.

Where this filter fails

A filter built on IP addresses inherits all the imprecision of IP addresses, and there is no shortage of it:

  • geolocation databases are not exact. They get the country reasonably right and get the city wrong far more often, which is enough to misclassify a share of visitors;
  • addresses are dynamic and shared. Many operators assign addresses that change and that serve several subscribers at the same time, so today's address may not say the same thing as yesterday's;
  • mobile networks complicate everything. While roaming, the phone is physically in one place and reaches the internet by a route belonging to the home operator, and that is enough for the filter to read the wrong country.

The last case is the most visible of all in the south of the country: the foreign visitor looking for escorts in Faro in high season sees the same address behave differently from what they are used to at home, without anything having changed on the site. The conclusion this subject deserves is this: country-level blocking is a coarse filter. It stops casual access, produces false positives regularly and does not, strictly speaking, constitute any control over who arrives. This page describes why the filter is imprecise; it does not explain, nor is that its purpose, how to get around it.

When there is no block at all

There is one cause of failure that has nothing to do with geography or with rules. A very large part of the adult web — big sites and small ones, competitors with one another and with no apparent technical connection — runs through the same handful of content delivery and attack protection providers. When one of those providers has an outage, everything it serves goes down at the same time: pages that will not load, 502 and 504 errors, video that starts and stops. It is not the country, it is not the device and it is not the site — it is an intermediate layer that half the sector depends on simultaneously, and you recognise it precisely because it is simultaneous and, as a rule, short.

Which side the problem is on

Without access to the logs of whoever serves the pages, nobody can be certain. What you can get is an order of suspicion, based on the shape of the failure:

  • several different sites at the same time, and almost all of them back shortly afterwards — the cause is usually shared infrastructure, not a decision about you;
  • one site only, always, for days or weeks — the cause is on that side: a domain change, a hosting problem or a restriction put in place by whoever operates it;
  • a symptom that comes and goes over the course of the same day — this is rarely a country block, because a country filter is a binary and constant decision: either the country gets through or it does not.

One distinction is missing, and it can be made with no tools at all: the one that separates the site from the page. If the listing of escorts in Porto opens and an individual profile inside it does not, what failed was a single request and not a country — no geographic filter blocks half a site. It is the kind of detail that saves a great deal of time for anyone convinced the door has been shut on them.