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 show. You could view it in the safety of your own home. You could even purchase it pay per view over over your cable or satellite system. Porn was going mainstream. But what about the kids? Who was to protect them?
Services like Surf Nanny and Cyber Watch evolved. They could quickly spider through a web site and tell your computer if the sites was appropriate. Spam blockers evolved to determine if your emails were legitimate or just a come on to some offensive site. Pop up blockers evolved to slow down the growth of an annoying, but effective marketing tool for the porn merchants and others. But even with all of these, and the plethora of expensive subscription virus guards, the porn industry and the Internet were still growing and evolving together.
One would think that the top money making sites on line were auction or catalog sites, Internet porn made profits that has dwarfed any and all of these sites 10 fold. Trying to slow its growth across the Web, by aiming at its top producers, only opened the door to foreign made and produced pornography, and the previously mentioned amateur market.
As a free country, The United States walks a fine line in trying to rid or regulate such an industry. No matter how many people claim to oppose it on a moral or ethical basis, the free market says otherwise. A majority of people like pornography in some form or the other, whether they want admit it or not. It's reflective in attitude. It's reflective in mainstream entertainment. Watch a music video today and see its influence. The Internet can only rid pornography by stopping the accessibility of reaching it. But using literature's bad girls Lady Chatterly's Lover and Moll Flanders as an example, if it can get produced, someone will find a way to view it. Barring a moral or cultural revolution, when it comes to on line pornography, one can try to tame it, but will also have a hard time putting it down.