Internet without porn (sort of)

[the_lyniezian]

Basically this harks back to a conversation (or, more properly, argument) an aquaintance and I had some years back concerning the usage of theInternet and whether it could exist (at least to the levels it did) without the porn industry being a major component. His argument (based perhaps on research- he was taking a computer science course and had done an assignment previously in A-level) the internet pretty much wouldn't exist, (minus a few small niche-market things such as Amazon) though of course as I pointed out) it might still be a means of information-sharing amongst academics and researchers- the initial intention of the World Wide Web IIRC?

So let us assume that, for example, we have a POD several decades ago, that the moral and legal reforms of around the 1960s did not happen,s and pornographic andexcplict works are still classed as obscene to the levels they were c. the 1950s. (I presume something was around then, legally, but not as "hardcore" as today.) What impact would it have on the uptake of the internet? I assume that in the early days, things were much less tightly controlled, and that such material would probably still get around, albeit illegally, as say child porn did before more recent clampdowns. On the other hand, I do suppose that in the early days, the Net probably had a much larger demographic among young adult males, who probably are more likely to spend a lot of time looking at porn, but not as an entirety of theier internet usage. (I.e. it is more a time factor, or maybe just an internet traffic factor as such materail requires a lot of data transfer due to images, videos, &c.)

So how does it affect the uptake of general Internet usage, how does it affect the pace of technological change, the amount of bandwidth "hogged", &c.? Are some e-business ventures going to do less well due to lack of porn? Can we expect a crackdown on illegal materail and how sucessful will it be?

Please, guys, serious discussion only, before you get your proverbial knickers in a twist.

 

[Sachyriel]

You mean without obvious porn, right? I mean, there are ways to encode images into other images that can only be opened with a special key and program. So internet, with images, but porn has to be transmitted covertly?

 

[Guildencrantz]

Then, there will be four sites. Cracked.com, this one, Wikipedia, and a site called "Bring back the porn!"

 

[Guarnasco]

well banning anything completly from the net as we know it is nearly impossible since no one could presently control the wole of it...

 

[Hendryk]

Hundreds of millions of teenage and young adult males, many of whom don't have much of a real life; a medium for exchanging digital documents, including images and videos; and no porn?

Anyway, if the prudish legislation of the 1950s remains in place, that will only mean a massive underground pornography industry, equal and possibly superior in size to the illegal drug industry. By the 1990s this industry would be plenty rich enough to afford the services of the best computer programmers to circulate pornographic material online despite any attempt to prevent it.

 

[Kevin R.]

Hundreds of millions of teenage and young adult males, many of whom don't have much of a real life; a medium for exchanging digital documents, including images and videos; and no porn?

Anyway, if the prudish legislation of the 1950s remains in place, that will only mean a massive underground pornography industry, equal and possibly superior in size to the illegal drug industry. By the 1990s this industry would be plenty rich enough to afford the services of the best computer programmers to circulate pornographic material online despite any attempt to prevent it.

And you also have to deal with foreign sites. I remember seeing an article criticizing online censorship which stated that half of all porn is from outside the US. Prudish Americans won't stop the inevitable tidal waves of porn that will flow out of Europe, the former USSR, and Southeast Asia. And if they try, then there will be an international incident. Bottom line: the Internet becoming the world's largest porn bank is inevitable.

 

[JohnJacques]

But is the internet necessarily international? In its formative days it wasn't.

As lyzie's proposed, the Internet would remain an academic resource, which means its commercial application might never bee seen. You have early newsgroups and email lists, but it never really kicks off as something in and of itself.

This could mean an internet with no porn- but it would also be an internet not even USEnetters could recognize.

 

[Northstar]

Don't some countries, i.e China have restrictions placed on internet access by the government anyway?
Things about Tibet are banned etc
And isn't there a way around it?

 

[JohnJacques]

Yes. But note that those things occurred after the development of the internet as we know it.

Lyzie's idea is not "remove porn from the modern internet". Its a change which simply makes it to where a porn industry wouldn't develop on the internet (and therefore, no commercial applications will really)

Its not sustainable, but it could set back the internet a while and when porn and commerce hit the internet, porn would have a much lesser presence.

 

[Sachyriel]

Don't some countries, i.e China have restrictions placed on internet access by the government anyway?
Things about Tibet are banned etc
And isn't there a way around it?

Mobile Physical Access Drives (Floppies, CDs, External HDs, Wireless routers) are really easy to physically smuggle.

But, there are a huge amount of proxy sites to go through. Each one is semi-shut down by a firewall. My aunts computer has a D-Link router with a firewall that blocks most proxies, but I've got a few that aren't blocked, and use those. but it's like a good sniping spot: you always have to move on to the next one when your opponent finds that one.

 

[the_lyniezian]

Part of my question is, would lack of mainstream porn also hamper other busines ventures from forming on the Internet directly, or is it just a case of (if anything) slower uptake?

 

[JohnJacques]

It would certainly slow down commercialization of the internet- porn was the first business to use the internet effectively and also, any way of restructuring the internet to prevent the rise of porn will require making the internet "unmarketable".

While commercialization would be inevitable, it would come later, and it would likely have less porn as a percentage of commercial transactions over the internet. But it would also have less commerce later.

 

[Mark E.]

In the eighties, spreadsheets and word processors became the main features of the personal computers in the business world. Image processing was limited. Suppose the Internet became widespread with an infrastructure with as text orientation that resembled the front page of the Wall Street Journal before it adopted color. The Internet would have to become popular, and accepted, well before color pictures were easy to upload and transmit. It would then take on the reputation as the "library on line" before porn could dominate. Barriers to entry might keep many sections of the Internet from upgrading to color images. Unfortunately, Internet marketing would be limited. Fortunately, industrial inventory management would be less so.

Another development might be an "Internet postage" or post mark that attaches an identity to the sender. Such a system is unworkable today, because so many fraudulent sites show "fake" sources. But if the tracking system was implemented before the fraud could develop, it might stay ahead in technology.

 

[Magniac]

If computer gaming develops as per OTL then people are gonna wanna take it online.

If camcorders, digital cameras, mobile phones (cells) develop as per OTL people are going to want social networking sites.

If vcrs, digital recorders, camcorders develop ... blah blah youtube etc (I'm not even taking into account the non-porn media giants putting content online--a senior Time magazine writer was on the Daily Show the other day and he said his magazine went onto the Net in the early nineties).

Anyway, who on earth ever bought a modem for their family PC in order to access porn?

(Also, no sexual and anti-censorship revolution in the '60s could have a serious effect on the world economy. Think of all the money not flooding into Hollywood, home videos, the music industry, etc. We could end up stuck with a perpetual Pong-era computer industry...)

 

[Scott_B]

Porn had had a huge influence on the commercialisation of technology. VHS won out over Betamax partly because all the porn was on VHS, also it helped bring down costs of VHS players and later DVD players with large numbers of porn fans among the early adopters.

Also they were presumably among the first industries to show it was possible to make siginificant money from the net, thus others follow. Indeed I'd expect mainstream content providers to start trying to mimic adult sites revenue stream ideas.

They were also among the first sites to stream video and the trading of porn, music and software created p2p and bit torrent, all leading to increased bandwith and all that we have now.

In short, take away the porn and the nets deveolpment may never go beyond text and images, or indeed never commercialises at all. Indeed to keep porn off it you would need extensive central control over creation of websites, imagine the effects of that on the modern world, no user created content of any kind, from sites down to social networks.