by Mj Ferruzza

Created on: December 05, 2008   Last Updated: January 23, 2009

When the Internet went mainstream in the early 90s, many believed that it was going to lead to New World Order. Countries with no fences, no barriers. People could communicate globally. People could share ideas and a vision for the future. People could share pictures of Jenna Jameson? The Internet has always had a nagging step child to drag along, Internet pornography. There was no way around it. It crept into every sector of the new mass medium. If you had a ISP that allowed it, hundreds of sites would pop up in a day. If you had email, you were bombarded with spam that directed you to those sites. If you threatened to ban it, free speech advocates would appear just to take you on. Internet porn was here and it was making money.

When the collapse of Internet commerce occurred in the mid 90s, which coincided with Big Business coming to light as woefully lacking in on line marketing and expertise, the biggest money maker across the World Wide Web was pornography. There were subscription sites as well as pay as you go sites, all much like the world of cell phone service today. Certain sites would evolve to promote these sites under one umbrella like sublimedirectory.com or persiankitty.com. But after it was all said and done, most of these individual sites were being supplied by only a handful on operators. But then came the amateur porn revolution. Any average Joe with a web cam and willing, yet hopefully adult aged participants could sell pictures and videos out of their own home. Daily spam mail directing millions to these sites literally exploded. Powerful search engine sites like Yahoo, who offered Internet Chat as a come on service for their growing number of browsers, chat groups in general and alt reader forums were bombarded with links and come ons to porn. It came to a head with criminal cases of inappropriate adult/child behavior. There had to be a regulation.
Where the government failed, self regulation was about to take effect. Internet companies like AOL led the charge to childproof their service. One could easily click on the adult guard feature and feel safe in knowing that their kids would not be seeing things they shouldn't, or at least not from their home computer. Church groups, Men's groups, Women's groups, all led the fight to stop porn from expanding throughout the Internet. But it continued to grow. Live web cams. Posted streaming movies. The porn industry no longer had to rely on anonymous brown paper mail orders or the neighborhood peep

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