Date: Friday, August 11, 2000 11:20 AM
From: Chris Ivey ([email protected])
Subject: Re: Judge Fails to Block Porn
Free speech equals porn ("Virginia Fails to Block Net Porn," Aug. 10, 2000). It's all bullcaca. Who cares about First Amendment drivel anyhow? The only real issues at stake here are click-throughs and money.
A while ago someone made a very valid and simple suggestion that would easily allow parents to protect their children from "adult content," and ease up on search-engine and name-space congestion. The suggestion was to create a new top-level domain for adult content (.adult, or .adt, or whatever you want). This would allow ISPs and parents easily to filter content. As a special bonus, popular search engines would no longer groan beneath the weight of porn spam.
There was immediately a chorus of First Amendment bitching and moaning: "Who would decide what constituted adult content?" they asked. "This intrudes on freedom of speech!" they whined.
I think it's simple: Any website that requires you to prove your age by paying money with a credit card is adult content. If the site features more than a few dozen pictures of people inserting parts of their bodies (or assorted foreign objects) into other parts of other people's (or animal's) bodies, it's probably adult-oriented content. If it features the words "cam" or "cum" more that 20 times in the first paragraph, there's a good bet that it qualifies as adult content.
The guidelines practically write themselves!
The truth of the matter is that those adult websites that don't collect credit card numbers to prove the visitor's age make their money by obfuscation and misdirection. They don't care who clicks through their miserable Web drivel so long as they can convince boondoggled, backwoods, yokel advertisers that millions of people are so interested in their particular brand of porn that they will seek it out and visit the lame enterprises of the advertisers featured on the page.
Consumer stupidity will cause the Internet to collapse beneath its own weight before we even have the time to find it boring.
