“The internet is for porn”, as the cheeky Avenue Q song reminds us. And the statistics back that up – around 30 per cent of worldwide internet traffic is porn, and 12 per cent of all websites are dedicated to the dissemination of smut.
There’s a good reason for that – it makes a lot of money. Lobbyists campaigning to ban or restrict access to internet pornography need to be aware it has a symbiotic relationship with the technology itself, funding its very existence.
It is natural human instinct to turn every newly available medium to the sharing of the lewd. You can bet it didn’t take long for cave painting to evolve from hand prints and woolly mammoth hunts to unnaturally priapic self-portraits.
In a former life as an IT consultant, I worked for a number of telecoms giants whose shiny new networks and successive generations of mobile services were partly funded by sex lines, often run out of unlikely locations like Peru. One mobile services company boosted the profits of its promotional SMS business with TV dial-a-babe offerings.
But the internet has made pornography available on a whole new scale without hard to explain telephone bills or visits to out-of-town newsagents. I completed my IT degree the year Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, and overnight bedroom-bound lads evolved from play-by-email Dungeons and Dragons to the painfully slow line-by-line downloading of pictures of naked ladies over shonky modems (“What’s that…? Eww!”).
Despite the claims by certain public figures, internet pornography doesn’t arrive on our screens unbidden. Even Googling “internet pornography” for this article didn’t offer me anything the least bit titillating on the first page of results.
That’s not to say it’s hard to get hold of online pornography if that’s what you’re looking for, far from it in fact, and internet giants are coming under increased pressure to make it harder for children to access it.
Part of the answer is to use automated internet parental controls. According to web security specialists Kapersky 23 per cent of blocked searches in the UK over the first five months of 2013 were for porn. But parents need to be educated that these sorts of content filters must be used alongside parental supervision and education for full effect.
But more widely, if we make legal pornography harder to access by consenting adults, will we hamper the march of innovation? It’s a little aired dirty secret of the telecom and internet giants that the recession-proof profits of pornography are what fund the evolution of technology.
Diane Abbott, Labour MP and shadow minister for public health, says: “Porn is the biggest driver of traffic to Google. You cannot allow the industry to drive the pace of change. So much money is riding on what happens.”
While kicking internet companies in the bank balance will get their attention as far as illegal content and access by minors is concerned, a wider clampdown on internet pornography may just hamper the arrival of the next internet. Bring on the smut.
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